If
you watched the first presidential debate between Hillary Clinton and
Donald Trump, you know one thing’s for sure: Trump is a loser.
Last
night, the GOP nominee had a nervous breakdown of sorts, as are all
of the white men who support him—all of those who have bemoaned
the loss of “their” country since 2008, and now make a
last ditch effort to “Make America Great Again.”
When
it comes to Trump’s birther ways, his open racial hostility and
callousness on issues of importance to the black community, what you
see is what you get. And his campaign, like his career, has been
built on lies, racism and fear.
This
first debate didn’t change that, it only solidified it.
It
would have been entertaining if the stakes were not so high. And it
is frightening to think that a man like Donald Trump—angry
bully that he may be—will win this thing if his opponent does
not. However, Trump made a fool of himself at Hofstra, going
to-to-toe with his Democratic rival and speaking foolishness on
issues of race and the issue over President
Obama’s citizenship–the controversy that wasn’t.
Lester
Holt, the debate moderator, provided Trump with a golden opportunity
to dispel the notion that he is a racist and running a racist
campaign. When asked what he would do to improve race relations, in
the midst of protests over police violence, Trump gave the most
baffling response one can imagine—that is, if he really wants
black people, or more realistically, white swing voters, to believe
he’s not a Klansman.
“Our
inner cities, African Americans and Hispanics are living in hell
because it’s so dangerous,” he said. Meanwhile, his
answer to all of the so-called violence in the black community is
“law and order”–a ramping up of the stop-and-frisk
policing that was championed by former New York Mayor Rudy Giuliani.
He
said noting of the racial profiling, the excessive monitoring of
Black communities by police, and the harassment African-Americans
face each day. While Holt, in his role as fact-checker reminded
Trump that stop-and-frisk was ruled unconstitutional by a federal
judge because it amounted to racial profiling, Trump responded, “No,
you’re wrong.” The GOP candidate also argued that the
judge was a “very against-police judge” and therefore
that didn’t count.
“No,
the argument is that we have to take the guns away from these people
that have them and they are bad people that shouldn’t have
them,” Trump added. “I think that I developed very, very
good relationships over the last little while with the African
American community,” he said. “I think you can see that.”
On
the birther issue, Holt asked Trump why it took him so long to
conclude that President Obama was born in the U.S. Trump claimed he
did a “great job and great service” in raising issues of
Obama’s citizenship. “Nobody was pressing it, nobody was
caring much about it … I was the one that got him to produce
the birth certificate and I think I did a good job,” Trump
added.
In
a rambling diatribe, he said a great deal but nothing that made any
particular sense, all the while arguing that Clinton started this
whole thing. “Sidney Blumenthal works for the campaign and a
very close friend of Secretary Clinton,” Trump began. “And
her campaign manager, Patti Doyle, went to — during her
campaign against President Obama, fought very hard. And you can go
look it up, and you can check it out. And if you look at CNN this
past week, Patti Solis Doyle was on Wolf Blitzer saying that this
happened.”
“Blumenthal
sent McClatchy, a highly respected reporter at McClatchy to Kenya to
find out about it,” Trump continued. “They were pressing
it very hard. She failed to get the birth certificate. When I got
involved, I didn’t fail. I got him to give the birth
certificate. So I’m satisfied with it, and I’ll tell you
why I’m satisfied with it.”
To
her own credit, Clinton characterized Trump’s birther claims as
a “racist lie,” reminding us that he “started his
political activity based on this racist lie that our first black
president was not an American citizen. There was absolutely no
evidence for it, but he persisted.
He
persisted year after year, because some of his supporters, people
that he was trying to bring into his fold, apparently believed it or
wanted to believe it,” she said, also noting that Trump has a
long record of racist behavior, would not rent to African Americans
in the 1970s, and was sued twice by the Justice Department.
What
Hillary left out of the equation was the full page ad that Trump
placed in four New York newspapers back in 1989. It was the time of
the Central Park jogger case, when five black and Latino teens were
falsely arrested, convicted and sent to prison for years for the
brutal rape of a white woman that someone else committed. “Bring
Back The Death Penalty. Bring Back The Police!” read the ad,
with a signed statement from Trump: “I want to hate these
muggers and murderers. They should be forced to suffer and, when they
kill, they should be executed for their crimes. They must serve as
examples so that others will think long and hard before committing a
crime or an act of violence.”
And
following the reelection of the first black president in 2012, Trump
took to Twitter, as he often does, to express his disgust:
This
is why the Klansmen, skinheads and neo-Nazis are behind this man.
In
the current election season, Donald Trump has brought the same
vitriol, raw hate and division with his promise to build a wall and
expel the undocumented Mexican immigrants, and his vow to throw all
Muslims out of the country. And for black people, let them have more
police brutality.
But
now, after the debate, Trump is sinking just like the Titanic. Omarosa
Manigault, the Trump campaign's director of African-American outreach,
Dr. Ben Carson, and those Negro preachers Darrell Scott and
Mark Burns, you’d better get that lifeboat now, and save
yourselves while you can.
This commentary originally appeard in The Grio
|