Tag Archives: David Cay Johnston

national news

Racist: It’s just a toxic term

Allow me one more comment on a quote taken from an extensive interview with a Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist who takes a dim view of the president of the United States.

David Cay Johnston said this to Salon. com: He is a racist through and through. He has been found in formal judicial proceedings to discriminate against nonwhites in rentals and employment.

Read the Salon piece here.

The “he” is Donald John Trump.

I am so struck by how easy it is to believe that Trump is a racist to his core.

Think for just a moment about the body of evidence that has been built up, most by the president’s own mouth.

  • He wanted to execute five young black men who had been exonerated in the rape and savage beating of a woman in Central Park, New York City.
  • Trump continued to keep alive the bald-face lie that Barack Obama, the nation’s first black president, was born in Kenya and was, therefore, unqualified to run for the office to which he was elected twice.
  • White supremacists, neo-Nazis and Ku Klux Klansmen protested the removal of a statue of Confederate Gen. Robert E. Lee. They launched a counter protest by those who oppose their racist views; a young woman was run over by one of the racists. Trump then said there were “fine people … on both sides” of the dispute in Charlottesville, Va. Both sides? Are you serious, Mr. President?

Time and time again, the president seems intent on denigrating people of color. He referred to residents of Haiti, El Salvador and throughout Africa as coming from “sh**hole” countries, while saying he preferred more immigrants from, say, Norway and Sweden.

Huh?

Yep. What in the world are we to conclude?

My conclusion is that 62 million Americans voted in 2016 for a racist as their president.

Shameful.

national news

Trump’s ‘ideology’ centers on … Trump

Some readers of this blog gripe occasionally that it spends too much time and consumes too much emotional energy beating up on Donald John Trump.

To which I say: Too bad; there will be plenty more on its way in due course.

Thus, I want to share some more thoughts from a man who dislikes the president of the United States as much as anyone. I get David Cay Johnston’s bias. He also is a long-honored journalist who has studied Trump up close for three decades.

He answered the question “Is Donald Trump an ideologue?” this way:

No. That’s the whole point of the first chapter of my book, “President Like No Other.” The 44 previous presidents were all over the map. There were smart people and dumb people, there were people of impeccable integrity such as Barack Obama and Jimmy Carter, there were absolute scoundrels like Warren G. Harding. We had a murderous racist in the White House whose painting hangs in the Oval Office, now looking down on Trump. What distinguishes all those presidents, particularly Chester Arthur, the one closest to Trump, is that they tried in the context of their times to make America better.

Donald Trump is a man with this desperate need for adoration. He is an empty vessel, the exact opposite of Henry David Thoreau — a “life unexamined.” His only philosophy is the glorification of Donald.

Read the entire Salon article here.

Johnston’s final quote gets right to the heart of why I and many others have opposed the very idea of Donald Trump serving as president.

He has built his entire professional life and career with one purpose: self-enrichment. Trump has succeeded. He tells us so whenever the opportunity presents itself.

Trump’s self-worth is all important. It seemingly matters more than the suffering of others, or the grief of others, or anguish of others.

On Memorial Day, for crying out loud, the president tweeted some hideous message about how those who had fallen in battle would be thrilled that the nation’s economy was doing so well. Of course, Trump took all the credit for that, giving new emphasis to the “me” in “Memorial Day.”

The absence of public service throughout the entirety of this man’s life is painfully evident whenever he opens his mouth.

Ideology? He doesn’t possess one.

As David Cay Johnston has noted so accurately, he thinks only of himself and how he can burnish his own image.