NYU Black Renaissance Noire NYU Black Renaissance Noire Vol 17.2: Fall 2017 | Page 6
editorial
My Take
It mattered not to those voters that
Donald Trump, a man said to have
an abnormally short attention span,
had absolutely no experience in
government or as a public servant on
any level (local, state, or national).
Nor did it matter that he purportedly
doesn’t read serious books, preferring
to get his information from cable
television (or create his own “fake
news” and “alternative facts”); that
he outsources his manufacturing
jobs overseas and employs foreign
workers at his resorts at home.
These voters proudly wore his “Make
America Great Again” caps and
other paraphernalia made in China
without the least bit of irony.
Neither did they care that he cheated
poor students out of their savings
at his fake university nor that he has
been married three times and has
admittedly mistreated women.
His bankruptcies also didn’t matter or
the fact that he reportedly consorts
with known criminals and Russian
mobsters. Despite his reputation as a
notoriously greedy kleptocrat,
self-centered narcissist, and pathological
liar, White people voted for him in
overwhelming numbers just because he
is a White man, albeit one who
had been a third rate television star.
At the core of this vote is a toxic
and virulent racism and profound
misogyny deeply ingrained in the
White American psyche.
For me, Trump’s presidency is a
copy-cat version of his former
“Apprentice” reality tv show, with
him a B-rated actor pretending to
be a gangster businessman ordering
everybody around and saying nasty
things about and to everybody he
dislikes and those who don’t flatter
him — former president Barack
Obama, Hillary Clinton, Reince
Priebus, whom he re cently fired
as White House Chief of Staff, Jeff
Sessions, his Attorney General,
and James Comey, whom he fired
as head of the fbi.
I suspect his celebrity status based on
his reality tv show also played a huge
role in forming his base of supporters,
especially the large number of
White women, surprising numbers
of Blacks, Latinos, Asians, and young
Whites, who voted for him and
who just didn’t seem to care about his
unsavory reputation and crass and
juvenile behavior. I think to young
Whites, Trump is like a character
from a comic strip, a fantastical,
harmless figure of entertainment, and
that they regard his presidency like
the “Survivor” television series or a
“Hunger Games” movie.
Donald Trump’s main goal, in my
opinion, is to squirrel away gazillions
of tax payers’ dollars in competition
with Vladimir Putin, who has
reportedly amassed over $200 billion
during his long reign as head of Russia
and who wears atop his balding
head the crown as the richest man
in the world. In my view, Donald
Trump is using the presidency of the
United States as his stepping-stone to
achieving, perhaps even exceeding, a
similar end. The massive flow of money
from foreign guests and members
of the Republican Party filling the
coffers of his Washington d.c. Trump
Hotel is a daily reminder of Trump’s
blatant violation of the emolument
clause, which is supposed to prevent
Presidents and other politicians from
enriching themselves while in office.
I don’t see the “bromance” with his
“base” of ill-informed White voters
and other supporters, the sycophantic,
cowardly herd of Republicans in
the Senate and Congress, the
namby-pamby, befuddled members of
the Fourth State (print, network and
cable tv news media) abating soon.
Too many are too busy ducking and
dodging all the bombast, the bullying,
the lie-infested tweets that the mad
45th President hurls at them.
Now Trump and his backers have
taken the unprecedented step of
ramping up “Trump News,” a live tv
broadcast airing from Trump Tower
in New York. The channel, led by
Trump’s daughter-in law, Lara Trump,
the wife of Trump’s son Eric, is set to
disseminate “fake news” and hype the
false achievements of Donald Trump.
At the time of this writing, Kayleigh
McEnany, a former conservative
commentator, who resigned from cnn
to take on her new job, is their on-air
personality. This new telecast on
Facebook resembles state-run news
agencies used to pump up and
celebrate bogus assertions by all
dictators, which the 45th President
yearns to become! Truly a troubling
and sordid development that should
concern every American citizen who
wants to live in a free democracy.
Having said all this, I sense an even
more harmful breakdown of civility
and normal governmental procedures
on the horizon, including the reshaping
of the federal judiciary, with right-wing
federal judges being approved by the
Republican Senate, while most people
are watching the Trump clown show
on tv and following the Trump
Twitterfest on social media. Under the
mantra of being friendly towards business,
these conservative judges will reverse
environment rules and laws, permitting
companies like Tyson and others to
continue creating dead zones in the Gulf
of Mexico, in lakes, rivers and protected
lands all across this country. I also
believe Mr. Trump and his enablers will
produce an exceedingly dark period of
interpersonal relationships between the
races, potentially leading to a possible
catastrophic racial conflagration that is
looming over the nation like a terrible
storm, and will ultimately lead to a
disaster that could destroy the country.
It will be neither a reality tv show, a
“Hunger Games” movie, nor an episode
of the “Survivor.” It will not be Isis
or a foreign government but the furor
within that does us in.
Once again, we at Black Renaissance
Noire are proud to offer you another
dynamic issue; we hope you find
it an exciting, engrossing read.
We are privileged to publish the poetry
of Opal Palmer Adisa, Basie Allen,
Sandra Cisneros, Victor Hernández
Cruz, Hakim Hasan, Jerzy Illig,
K. Curtis Lyle, Thylias Moss,
Ishmael Reed, Valencia Robin,
Mervyn Taylor, Ijeoma Umebinyuo
and Derek Walcott; the fiction of
paul r. harding, John McCluskey and
Ishmael Reed; the non-fiction prose of
Andre Bagoo, Elena Karina Byrne,
Wallace Ford, Paul Carter Harrison
on Derek Walcott and August Wilson,
Patricia Hinds on the artists-brothers,
Beauford and Joseph Delaney,
E. Ethelbert Miller on Lucille Clifton,
Judylyn S. Ryan, Cathy Kimball on the
visual art of Oliver Lee Jackson, and
Camille Yarbrough; and the visual art
of Nicole Awai, Daniel Dabriou, Leroy
Henderson, Chester Higgins Jr, Oliver
Lee Jackson and James Little.
Finally, with great sadness I want to
take note of the passing this year of
two remarkable artists: the great poet
and playwright, Derek Walcott, from
the Caribbean island of St. Lucia, who
received the Nobel Prize for Literature
in 1992, and Vertamae Smart-Grosvenor,
the legendary, pioneering “culinary
anthropologist,” raconteur, and
award-winning radio personality.
Both were close personal friends of
mine, and I miss them immensely.
As always, dear reader, your comments
and feedback are welcome and
appreciated on this and every issue.
Thank you for your continued support
of our efforts. n
Exit polls from the 2016
election suggested that
many White Americans
who voted for Donald J.
Trump for President of
the United States over
Hillary Clinton did so as
a reaction against the
presidency of Barack
Obama, and also because
they preferred a White
male over a White
woman in that job.
His refusal to acknowledge that an
overwhelming number of members
of the intelligence community
accept as fact that Russia hacked into
the 2016 Presidential election to
favor electing him over Hillary Clinton
and his craven tendency to just lie
about almost everything (since
becoming president, it’s reported that
he has told over 900 at the time of this
writing), coupled with his extremely
high level of incompetence, have
plunged the nation’s standing around
the world to its lowest depths in
the histor y of this great country to
the point where the United States
has become a piñata for all around
the world to bash.
In the final analysis, however, this sad,
depressing scenario is all about money
(at least it is in the way I view it) — all
about Trump making boatloads of
greenbacks from his exalted position
as President of this yet-to-be United
States of America. His presidency also
provides Trump’s more well-heeled,
mostly White fellow kleptocrats a path
to making even more money, while
the welfare of the country be damned!
The lunacy of this out of control idiocy
is not just a terrible state of affairs,
it’s also a highly inefficient way to run
a country, not to mention cleaving
an even greater racial and class divide
in an already broken nation.
President-elect Donald Trump walks to take his seat for
the inaugural swearing-in ceremony at the U.S. Capitol
in Washington, D.C., Friday, January 20, 2017.
Trump’s sad performance at the
g-20 gathering of world leaders in
Hamburg, Germany in July of this
year — especially his ridiculous,
unprecedented, unhinged speech
preceding the g-20 gathering in
Warsaw, Poland, where he continued
his attack on former President
Barack Obama and the entire
American security and intelligence
establishment with blatant lies
each and every day — made him into
a virtual laughing stock.
By Quincy Troupe