The American dream has had two enemies from the beginning, loyalists and racists. We’ve fought a literal war with each enemy before, and we’ve won both times. Now we’re at a virtual war with both at the same time, and both are headed by the same person: Donald J. Trump.
Let’s begin with racism. Trump is the most racist president this nation has ever had, by far. I looked it up. The three most racist presidents, according to Huff Post, were Andrew Johnson (1865-69), Andrew Jackson (1829-37), and Ronald Reagan (1981-89). But even if you put all their sins together, they don’t hold a candle to Trump.
Look at him. He’s allowing white Afrikaners into the United States because they “are being persecuted by Black people,” but he refuses to admit refugees from Haiti or “shithole countries” in Africa who are experiencing mind-boggling horrors every day. He wants people of tomorrow to forget that there was anything about slavery or Jim Crow that was important enough to remember. He even canceled free admission to national parks on Martin Luther King Day and Juneteenth, our only Black-oriented holidays, and replaced them with free entrance on June 14, which is Flag Day and also his birthday . He has faced federal charges that he discriminated against Black people at his businesses. He was among the loudest voices behind a baseless attack on the legitimacy of the nation’s first Black president. His cabinet is among the least diverse in modern history. He is doing everything possible to keep America’s white people in the majority, as huge a majority as he can. He considers people of color “garbage.” Donald Trump is worthy of a place of honor on the Ku Klux Klan Hall of Fame.
His treatment of Brown people is even worse. Trump somehow persuaded the Supreme Court to let him arrest Brown people just because they’re Brown, and ICE agents are doing just that. They don’t care whether you are an American citizen, a citizen of another country with permission to be here, or an undocumented resident – which, incidentally, is not a crime; it is a civil breach. They won’t care if you have a passport or papers proving you are an American citizen. If you are Brown, you are guilty of being Brown, and that’s all they need to arrest you, deny you any contact with the outer world, including your family or a lawyer, and often deport you to a prison in another country – not your own – where you will be denied decent food, decent health conditions, decent anything. You will be tortured, including being sexually assaulted. Some of you will die. Just a few days ago, a 48-year-old man detained at Fort Bliss died in ICE custody after being denied the medical care he needed, for no other reason than his skin was brown.
This is having an effect. Brown people are not going to church as much as they used to, although you know they want to. They’re not shopping as much, not going to restaurants as much. Businesses are hurting because of it. Brown people are, understandably, afraid, and are staying inside as much as possible. Again, just because their skin is brown.
Trump and people who think like him, people who think dirty pink is somehow better than black or brown – or red, or yellow, or green with purple polka dots – base are the sons of those who once believed slavery was a good thing and forced the Civil War over it.
But Trump also heads the loyalists, spiritual sons of those Americans in the 1770s who opposed what became the American Revolution. Their loyalty was to the king. There is no royalty today, of course, but there is loyalty to the idea of letting one person run the government, and in this case that would be Donald Trump. And here, Trump can cause even more damage than he did as a racist.
Let’s start at the beginning here. Ivana Trump, who was married to Donald while he was a real estate mogul and presidential candidate on the Reform Party’s 2000 ticket, said he kept a book of speeches by the Nazi Fuhrer Adolf Hitler in a locked drawer next to his bed, and studied the speeches religiously.
Since then, Trump often copies Hitler by using his language, like calling people he doesn’t like vermin. More important, he uses strategies that come directly from Hitler’s playbook, especially Hitler’s dictum to lie, lie often, lie big, and keep on lying even when it is proven beyond a shadow of a doubt that you are lying, because enough people will believe you and follow you anyway to make it worth your while.
From there Trump went on to be elected president twice, and now, executing Hitler’s teachings by following the pattern set out for him by Project 2025, Trump is well on his way to becoming the first American Fuhrer – spiritual son of the man America went to war in 1941 to stop.
Because of that person, words like Nazi, Fuhrer, Gestapo (rhymes with ICE), holocaust and Auschwitz were words that sent, and send, chills down my spine, as I think they do for most older Americans (I’m 86). And I think the reason for that is that we grew up with the horrors of Hitler and World War II in our immediate rear-view mirrors. They are indelibly burned into our memories.
Young people don’t have that, so it is understandable they are not as involved in the No Kings-type rallies as we are. It’s human nature that the further you are separated from an event, the less real it is. The same will happen in future years when people look back on these wrenching days.
I was born in 1939 so I remember only snippets of World War II. I remember the top halves of all automobiles’ headlights painted black so that pilots of enemy warplanes could not see them clearly. I remember my mother flattening tin cans from the grocery, then depositing them outside my bedroom window where occasionally a truck would come by and cart them off to be melted and turned into war machinery.
What I remember much more clearly is the war’s immediate aftermath, my uncles and my friends’ uncles and parents coming home from the war, some with missing limbs, and telling their stories, including stories of the many who did not come home. The Holocaust was real to us, a horror that had just happened, a fresh reality. That’s why names like Hitler and Mussolini were enough, and are enough, to make our skin crawl.
Someone once said that the only people who want to live under a dictator are those who have never lived under one. We older folks have never lived under one, but we’ve been close enough that the horrors are forever burned into our memories.
Perhaps it doesn’t matter. We all don’t need to come at the problem with the same motivations. We just need to remember that good people of all ages and backgrounds defeated authoritarianism in the 1770s and racism as a component in the 1860s, and we’ll do it again. We are doing it again, even if it is a two-headed monster that we’re fighting this time.
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