Why I Hate And Fear Donald Trump So Much

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The recent political victory of Donald Trump in the US both disgusts and terrifies me, and I’m not even American. I had no option to vote for Hillary Clinton, who would undoubtedly have been my favoured candidate. For much of his campaign, Trump seemed to have no chance. He was a joke to many. America had become liberal and enlightened enough to elect a black President after such a shameful history of racism fuelled slavery and oppression. The promised rise of Hillary Clinton seemed to indicate a similar progressive leap forward for women. Trump never seemed to have a prayer. His bigotry and casual sexism, crude disgusting impersonations of disabled opponents, and open threat – promise to wall off Mexico (footing them the bill) and blatant Islamophobia seemed to cripple his chances. Trump seemed to be a cue for easy stand up comedy routines, but as the 2016 election loomed the threat got serious. However, despite Trump camp efforts to create scandals for Hillary she seemed destined for victory right to the end, and even the polls seemed to favour her. Like many I slept through the election results coverage (which came in the early hours of the morning in the UK) and woke expecting to hear Clinton’s victory speech on the radio. That Trump had won seemed like a nightmare or some unthinkable parallel reality, and the shock just left me numb. It was worse than the loss of our place in the European Community to the Brexit supporters which had a similar feel, but Trump’s victory felt apocalyptic, as though the US had elected to follow Satan, Hitler, and / or Voldermort. Bigots have always appalled me. ON TV they are seen as harmless loners, out of touch with reality and stewing quietly in their narrow opinions. Alf Garnett and his US counterpart Archie Bunker would rant and despair ineffectually while their dutiful wives offered comfort and made them a nice cup of coffee. In reality, the bigots were denying progress to anyone of non-Caucasian skin pigmentation advancement in the workplace, and often even a job at all. The police turned inner city regions into ghettos and virtually every black teenager was frisked for drugs or guns by prowling cops eager for a quick easy arrest. I once reported to the police that I saw a man attacking a woman in the street. The policeman I spoke to on the phone asked if he was black. When I said no, he hung up on me. Women were denied equal pay status and I grew up in an age when pubs still had rooms for the use of men only. The streets were daubed with graffiti swastikas and NF symbols, NF being The National Front, a far-right minority party, who’s members were not averse to breaking the windows of Pakistani shops, (Kristallnacht in microcosm), beating up black people, and demanding that anyone not born in the UK get sent home. In elections, they mostly got nowhere, but on the streets, they were lethal. My school was mercifully multi-racial and multicultural. The gender and race/religion of my friends was irrelevant to me, but sometimes the dreaded NF symbols appeared even on school walls and fences. A black friend came in to school after emergency time off, still bearing the scars from a racist assault. I learned that his home had twice been petrol bombed. Excrement was regularly smeared on his windows and shoved through his letter box. He took such incidents as the norm of day to day life. The school was increasingly concerned and eventually sent us all on a race-awareness conference. Among speakers who made a huge impression on me was a retired soldier who had witnessed first hand the liberation of one of the concentration camps. That was a real eye-opener for me. My dad was a big fan of war movies and books, but it was all to do with the fighting and bravery under fire of the soldiers, not this. I had been shielded from this. Suddenly, the Holocaust was everywhere around me, and probably always had been, but my eyes were now opened. I read Anne Frank and many testimonies by survivors from the camps, Primo Levi, etc. I watched the TV mini-series Holocaust that gave Meryl Streep to the world, and I saw how often the NF who I associated with attacks on African and Pakistani families already were also targeting the Jewish community, wrecking cemeteries and attacking synagogues. There was a TV show in the UK called Love Thy Neighbour with a bold daring premise. An outright racist suddenly found a black family moving in next door. This was treated as a sit-com, with racism in the cosy world normally associated with Terry & June. The bigot always fared badly and everyone ignored him, as he only ever voiced his dire opinionations. He never went for physical attacks on anyone. Racism was seen as middle-class and harmless here. The NF was proving the opposite was very much the true picture. Unable to use the aggressive N word, the show offered its own modified variation, which became an instant catch-phrase, and a new slogan for the real racists. Many a black kid and adult in the UK was to hear the Love Thy Neighbour N word over the next decade. The comedy simply threw the word in for cheap instant laughs. It was trying hard to genuinely show racism in a bad light, but it did more harm than good in the end and got quite rightly pulled – the first and most obvious casualty of a new enlightened politically correct comedy that was devoid of racist, sexist stereotyping. The few comedians clinging to racist and sexist jokes became the last living dinosaurs, and a few still hang on by their fingernails to a crumbling cliff over the abyss they richly deserve. In the late 1970’s I went to a rock against racism event, primarily because it was a free opportunity to see some great punk bands I already liked, including The Buzzcocks. The anti-racist message was potent too however, and the NF rally that was timed for the same day was diffused to avoid confrontation. The anti-racist rally also inspired my poetry as I was blown away there by a punk-poet called John Cooper Clarke. It would however be another six years before my own verses were first penned. The NF was losing ground for its outright open nastiness, but in the Thatcherite era of political spin and salesmanship weasel wording, where politicians moved from lying to being ‘economical with the truth’ (a precursor to Trump’s Alternative facts), the NF was reborn as the British National Party, a fore-runner to UKIP, moving away from skin-head thuggery (except at weekends and when they thought no cameras were watching) to slick suits and corporate marketing, seeking a thin insincere veneer of middle-class respectability. It wasn’t working for them, but not because their stance was appalling. The mainstream parties were beginning to steal their more popular declarations and tactics. Immigration control was suddenly a central political issue. Everything seemed to be easily blamed on having too many foreign nationals taking our houses and jobs – simplistic scapegoating. Suddenly, UKIP was a voice to be heard and though failing as a party in its own right, largely due to in-fighing in its own ranks rather than liberal opposition, its influence on Brexit isolating the UK from Europe was immense. In The US too the far right has gained ground, especially since post-9/11 hysteria gave rise to Islamophobia as the new soft target for every bigot from the cross burning KKK clowns to the chap worried quietly that he might be on a bus one day when the mate with the Koran who always seems polite and pleasant to chat with suddenly presses the trigger on a concealed belt full of semtex on the bus. Everywhere the quiet racists still start conversations with ‘I’m not racist but….’ Before launching into a monologue that proves they are very racist indeed. I have even seen this among members of my own family. And there was Trump openly promising what the bigots dreamed of, a World where women knew their place, foreigners are driven off-soil, Islam is subjected to anti-jihadist reprisals on a scale unseen since the Crusades, torture is openly licensed, and bleeding-heart liberalists are silenced through constitution-tearing disregard for freedom of the press. Trump is going beyond the neo-Nazi, to bring back the values of the outright undiluted Fascists. If unchallenged, if not stopped, he is only going to fuel similar revivalism among the far-right in the US, Europe and UK. It will become the norm again to see shops burnt, people beaten in the streets, the police failing to take racist attacks seriously as hate-crime is barely regarded as any crime at all. We will see women’s rights pushed back, as sexual molestation and even rape becomes harder to prosecute. After the international joy of seeing the Berlin Wall torn down, Trump is a hair’s breath from building a new one dividing America and Mexico. He is undoing Obama care, replaced in effect with Trump-don’t care, and his misogyny towards all women is so well known it is hard to imagine how he won so many votes. He won despite Hillary Clinton proving more popular, but Trump laments the media pointing out the lack of genuine praise his hollow victory secured. His inauguration speech, bizarrely plagiarizing a movie supervillain, Bane, in Batman – The Dark Knight Rises, was presented to only a modest rain-soaked audience. Media photos comparing the empty spaces before Trump to the massive crowds that welcomed Obama have infuriated Trump into claiming the media are lying. He thinks the World adores him but keeps facing the reality of a strong movement of opposition. He is trying to silence that opposition. It is an excuse for Orwellian control of an otherwise free press. Trump is increasingly dictatorial, unwilling to hear no, or alternative courses of action. He is going beyond Fascism which would be to the bunker mentality of Hitler. There will be readers thinking I am guilty of breaking Godwin’s Law here, which states that when you compare an opposing view to Hitler you have lost, but when your opposing view is championing mass deportation, ending women’s right to choose an abortion, making health care only available to the rich, building walls, and making torture respectable again, the Hitler comparison actually trumps over Godwin. Trump’s call for reinstatement of torture, water-boardng and off-shore detention camps like Guantanamo Bay are blatant in your face human rights abuses by a petulant egomaniac president who thinks he is above account to all. It will prove to be his downfall as he is going too far too fast. Even in defeat as he is hopefully dragged kicking and screaming from office to face impeachment and trials that will make Watergate look like a picnic, the far righters will still see him as a martyr to their vile hateful ideological mission. The free World must be vigilant to remain free now. We live in extremely dangerous times. Trump’s triumphalist march to political respectability should have crashed and burnt right there, so his presence at the White House is truly unthinkable but that is the stark reality facing the World now. Youtube reminder of who now runs the White House – Trump mocking a disabled reporter with a childish imitation of his physical condition. Arthur Chappell