Donald Trump’s racist attack on Baltimore, USA

This 28 July 2019 video from the USA says about itself:

Black People Were Right About Trump

Trump and his racist efforts came from the conservative movement. Brooke Thomas, Jayar Jackson, and David Dennis Jr. break it down on The Damage Report.

By Joseph Kishore in the USA:

The political strategy behind Trump’s racist diatribe against Baltimore

29 July 2019

Donald Trump’s racist diatribes against Democratic Congressman Elijah Cummings and the city of Baltimore mark a calculated escalation of his efforts to base his reelection campaign on the incitement of an openly fascistic movement.

On Saturday, Trump tweeted that Cummings’ district, which encompasses half of Baltimore City, is a “rat and rodent infested mess”, a “disgusting & filthy place” and a “corrupt mess”. He concluded, “No human being would want to live there.”

On Sunday, Trump retweeted a statement from the fascistic columnist of the UK Sun newspaper, Katie Hopkins, referring to Baltimore as a “sh*thole”, a reference to his previous statements denigrating African countries with the same insult. Hopkins is known for her vicious attacks on immigrants, including a statement in 2015 that “migrants are like cockroaches” and “are built to survive a nuclear bomb.”

Trump’s filthy rants follow his attacks on four Democratic congresswomen two weeks ago, during which he wrote that all four should “go back” to the “crime infested places from which they came.” He declared that the congresswomen, all of whom are US citizens, “hate our Country” and support “terrorism”. In April 2018, Trump denounced “sanctuary cities” in California for promoting a “ridiculous, crime infested & breeding concept.”

Trump is not just talking. His latest statements take place as the administration is intensifying its attack on immigrants, threatening mass roundups throughout the country and confining thousands in concentration camps on the US-Mexico border.

Words have meaning and consequences. The denunciation of an American city and its citizens by a sitting president in such blatantly racist terms has no precedent in the history of the United States. Trump is playing with fire, and he knows it. He and his advisers believe that his racist comments will not only encourage and rally his supporters on the far right. Trump also calculates that his blatant provocations will intensify an already unstable political environment, with an immense potential for violence, and create conditions that will enable him to invoke dictatorial powers to uphold “law and order”.

The president also escalated his denunciation of socialist and “radical left” politics over the weekend. He tweeted Sunday morning that “Consideration is being given to declaring ANTIFA [antifascists], the gutless Radical Left Wack Jobs who go around hitting (only non-fighters) people over the heads with baseball bats, a major Organization of Terror (along with MS-13 & others). Would make it easier for police to do their job!” This means that the government is preparing direct measures to criminalize left-wing views.

Given the scale of the provocation, the response of the Democratic Party is a typically gutless combination of cowardice and evasion. While the Congressional testimony by former Special Counsel Robert Mueller last week was a debacle for the Democrats, this has not stopped them from intensifying their obsessive and neo-McCarthyite denunciations of “Russian meddling” and “foreign interference” in American politics.

The premise of the Democrats’ narrative of a Russian plot is that the real threat to American democracy comes from the Kremlin, rather than the White House. Moreover, the Democrats’ pretense of opposition to Trump is exposed by the fact that he can count in their support when he needs it.

The extent of agreement of all factions of the political establishment was expressed in the overwhelming passage last week by the House of Representatives of a budget bill backed by the Trump administration, which includes a record $738 billion in military spending. …

At the same time, the campaign over “foreign interference” in US politics—of which no serious evidence has ever been presented—has been utilized to implement a regime of internet censorship and attacks on free speech. The Democrats have spearheaded the campaign against WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange for exposing the secrets of American imperialism while maintaining a complete silence on the fate of whistleblower Chelsea Manning, who remains in prison for refusing to testify against Assange.

The Democrats’ overriding concern is to block the development of any independent movement of the working class. …

The Trump administration must be removed from office, but the question is how and by what methods. By now it should be clear that the policy of the Democrats has been aimed at keeping Trump in office. Even if they were to remove Trump through some sort of palace coup, it would leave the basic policy of the ruling class unaltered. The immediate consequence would be an escalation of war threats against Russia.

The urgent task of the working class is to break free of the political straitjacket of the two capitalist parties and intervene independently.

The fight against the Trump administration must be developed as a mass movement from below. Opposition to the Trump administration’s fascistic attack on immigrants and racist appeals must be connected to the great social questions that are motivating growing struggles of the working class internationally: the fight against inequality, attacks on jobs and wages, censorship, and war.

Any claim that such a perspective is unrealistic is refuted by developments in Puerto Rico, where mass protests forced the resignation of Governor Ricardo Rosselló. It is part of a growing wave of social unrest, including the yellow vest movement in France, the ongoing demonstrations in Hong Kong, and the mass protests in Algeria. While the eruption in Puerto Rico, independent of the establishment parties … has succeeded in forcing out Rosselló, the social and political forces behind him—in Wall Street and in Washington—remain.

What the events in Puerto Rico demonstrate, however, is not only that a mass movement is possible, but it is the much more likely path of development.

The removal of governments will not come through the maneuvers in the political establishment but from the intervention of the working class. This requires new organizations of struggle. The Socialist Equality Party calls for the development of a network of popular workplace and neighborhood committees, independent of all political parties … to link up every separate struggle in a common offensive against the capitalist ruling elite. This must be connected to a clear anti-capitalist, anti-imperialist and socialist program.

When President Trump characterized immigrants as “animals,” some people waved it away, claiming he was only referring to gang members. But his use of “infest” in connection to human beings is impossible to ignore. The president’s tweet that immigrants will “infest our Country” includes an alarming verb choice for anyone with knowledge of history. Characterizing people as vermin has historically been a precursor to murder and genocide. The Nazis built on centuries-old hatred of Jews as carriers of disease in a film titled “Der Ewige Jude,” or “The Eternal Jew.” As the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum notes on its website, in a section helpfully titled “Defining the Enemy:” “One of the film’s most notorious sequences compares Jews to rats that carry contagion, flood the continent, and devour precious resources”: here.

TRUMP SLAMMED BALTIMORE YEARS AGO, BLAMING OBAMA Trump pummeled Baltimore years ago in a series of tweets — but back then he held Barack Obama responsible for the city’s crime, pointing out that he was an “African American president” and sarcastically referring to him as “great.”  [HuffPost]

TRUMP AGAIN ASSAILS BALTIMORE, ATTACKS MORE U.S. CITIES At a raucous rally in Cincinnati, Ohio, on Thursday night, Trump continued to drag the city of Baltimore through the mud ― and extended his attacks to Chicago, San Francisco and Los Angeles. [HuffPost]

HUNGER-STRIKING IMMIGRANTS FORCED TO HYDRATE Three Indian nationals seeking asylum in the U.S. have been forced to receive IV drips at a U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement facility in Texas as they approach their third week of a hunger strike, according to their attorney. [AP]