Editor’s note: This commentary is by Walt Amses, a writer and former educator from North Calais.
[D]eprived of a fawning audience, without a stage full of Republican patsies, and with both moderator and opponent asking fair, factual questions, Donald Trump disintegrated during the first presidential debate through a combination of his own ineptitude and a series of withering counterattacks by Hillary Clinton. Point by delicious point, Clinton vividly called into question not only the real estate mogul’s qualifications for the presidency, but also his cavalier ignorance of the responsibility embodied in that office.
Highlight reels of Trump’s difficulties have illuminated indefensible positions on a range of issues from his initial support of the Iraq invasion — which he denies despite recorded evidence; his deplorable fat-shaming of a beauty pageant winner; and his five-year effort to delegitimize the presidency of Barack Obama. The Donald and other conspiracy theorists across the land had maintained (and many still do) that the president was born in Africa and, consequently, ineligible to serve.
While Trump’s presidential campaign has largely provided a safe haven for thinly veiled racism, the Aryan Nations/KKK members of his constituency should perhaps be aware of emerging news out of the scientific community indicating every human being on earth likely can trace their roots to Africa. According to a New York Times report, citing the journal Nature: “Three separate teams of geneticists surveyed DNA collected from cultures around the globe, many for the first time, and concluded that all non-Africans today trace their ancestry to a single population emerging from Africa between 50 and 80 thousand years ago.”
There’s a certain beauty in the irony that cretins like former Grand Wizard David Duke — who has supported Trump from the beginning and babbles about Jews controlling the media along with “ethnic purity” — will no longer be able to revel in the ancestral brotherhood he shares with Strom Thurmond and Jesse Helms without including actual brothers … like Malcolm X and James Brown.
How out-of-touch with the real world must he be to expect that citing one of the few people as credibility-challenged as himself could set the record straight on anything?
As Trump incoherently doubled down on his assertion that only he was able to have the president produce his birth certificate, which he felt performed a vital service to the country (and bizarrely, to the president as well) for which he was “very proud,” it felt distinctly that he was trying to board a train that left the station five years ago.
As he came up for air with a mysterious, audible snort, Clinton was waiting to pounce: “He began his political life 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 … 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.”
The former secretary of state then reminded viewers that this was nothing new: “Donald started his career back in 1973 being sued by the Justice Department for racial discrimination because he would not rent apartments to African-Americans and he made sure that the people who worked for him understood that was the policy … so he has a long record of engaging in racist behavior.” Trump admitted as much but typically boasted that they had “settled the suit with zero — no admission of guilt.”
As if to put a fine point on how the thrice-married Trump maintains BS as a mistress, when the chips were down Monday evening and his veracity was circling the drain, he implored his doubters to call Sean (“I never said I was a journalist”) Hannity for corroboration. A denizen of Fox News and one of the founding architects of the post-factual culture, Hannity has supported The Donald’s abysmal grasp of facts and tendency toward unchallenged fabrication from the outset.
How out-of-touch with the real world must he be to expect that citing one of the few people as credibility-challenged as himself could set the record straight on anything? This one small judgment in the entire surrealistic campaign of Donald Trump should raise red flags for anyone who takes the country seriously, providing yet another, amply clear indication that he is the last person in the world who should occupy the oval office.
