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** By APD writer Lu Jiafei**
Washington, Sept. 25 (APD) -- Before Donald Trump’s “son-of-a-bitch” broadside over the weekend against black athletes who protested the injustice, I had thought that nothing this erratic, uncouth and thin-skinned president would say would surprise me anymore.
Regretfully, I have underestimated Trump’s vulgarity, and together with it, his uncontrollable, and probably intentional, impulsiveness to sow the seeds of conflicts.
This round of Guess-who’s-Trump’s-Punching-Bag started Friday night at a political rally in Alabama, when the president, seemingly out of nowhere, felt that he needed to blast black National Football League (NFL) players who knelt during the national anthem to protest police brutality against African-Americans.
“Wouldn’t you love to see one of these NFL owners, when somebody disrespects our flag, to say, ‘Get that son of a bitch off the field right now. Out! He’s fired. He’s fired!’” said Trump at a rally for Republican senator Luther Strange, who is running in a special election next week to remain in the seat.
His supporters at one of the most racist states in the country erupted in cheers.
One day later, Trump targeted Stephen Curry of the NBA champion team Golden State Warriors, also a black athlete, on twitter because Curry said that he did not want to go to the White House as invited by Trump.
“Going to the White House is considered a great honor for a championship team. Stephen Curry is hesitating, therefore invitation is withdrawn!” Trump tweeted.
Trump was soon met with widespread condemnations, with NFL commissioner Roger Goodell calling his comments “divisive,” and this new episode renewed the accusation by ESPN anchor Jemele Hill about a week ago that Trump was “a white supremacist.”
Just a quick reminder for you: Trump’s sluggish reaction to the deadly alt-right white supremacist groups’ protest back in August in Charlottesville has still not changed.
Whether himself or those enablers around him acknowledge it or not, Trump’s flurry of derogatory comments targeting black athletes this time were racially charged, and the deliberate inflammation in tone was so outrageous that you simply have to wonder, what in the world was on his mind when he said those words?
It is not hard to ascertain the rationale behind Trump’s campaign-style governance that still seeks to pit “us” against “them”. After all, he knows better than anyone else how by dividing the country has he risen to power.
Despite his pledge to unite the country at the outset of his presidency, a series of highly controversial moves, including the travel ban, the transgender ban in military and withdrawal from the Paris agreement on climate change, have shown clearly that reaching out to the other part of the nation that voted against him in election has never been on his agenda.
In 2016, Candidate Trump, who created chaos and sowed division, became the last man standing in the rubble. In 2017, President Trump is determined to walk down the same path.
On Sunday, a new Washington Post-ABC News poll found that 66 percent of Americans believed that Trump was doing more to divide the country than unite it.
The problem is, Trump does not care how those 66 percent think of him. His focus is purely on the remaining proportion of the population that till now has stayed loyal to him and his destructiveness.
rump does not care about unity. All he wants is division. To his supporters, the message remains the same: “They are and will never be one of us.”
Divisiveness, thy name is Donald Trump.
Lu Jiafei, researcher of APD Institute. After spending one year in Palestine covering the Israeli-Palestinian conflict between 2013 and 2014, Lu moved to Washignton, D.C. and covered the 2016 U.S. presidential election till the very end of Donald Trump’s upset victory. He is a political contributor to APD.
(ASIA PACIFIC DAILY)
