Friday, September 30, 2016

Donald Trump Un-American?

Donald Trump is an objectively terrifying candidate. He’s a racist, a xenophobe and a misogynist (in a surprisingly underrated manner). He dabbles in antisemitism and mocks his opponents like a middle school bully. However, in their effort to critique Trump in a way that is “relatable” and generates clicks, corporate media all too often turn to lazy orientalist tropes and patriotic schlock to “other” him without having to do the messy work of ideological analysis, or running the risk of offending America’s nationalist sensibilities:



  Adam Johnson @ FAIR
Adam has a Tweet listing all the latest comparisons, including, in addition to the above: Putin, Stalin, Kim Jong Il, Saddam Hussein, Ahmadinegad, Castro and Caligula.
Liberals, seeing a weakness in Trump’s disjointed message, have decided to outflank Trump from the right.

[...]

This tic was again found in President Barack Obama’s speech  [...]  at the DNC, when he called Trump “un-American.” [...] Trump was something foreign, without precedent, that could only be understood in the context of things outside The Greatest Country on Earth.

[...]

Brooklyn College political science professor Corey Robin capped off this point: “What do the ‘we’ve never seen anything like Trump’ and ‘Putin is electing Trump’ memes have in common? They both exonerate American history.”

[...]

Aside from the implication that the US is uniquely civilized, it whistles past America’s own history of racism, normalizes the Democrats’ more subtle brand of immigrant deportation and war-mongering, and propagates xenophobic assumptions about “Third World” disfunction and serves to stoke Cold War panic with Russia.

[...]

Trump is as American as apple pie.

[...]

As FAIR has noted before, the instinct to explain the seemingly inexplicable rise of Trump by blaming a foreign influence–or likening it to something from non-white or Slavic countries–is as lazy as it is subtly racist. Trump is Trump. Trump is American. His bigotry, his xenophobia, his sexism, his contempt for the media, his desire to round up undesirables, all have American origins and American explanations. They don’t need to be “like” anything else. They are like us.
...but hey, do what you want...you will anyway.

No comments: