Copyright © 2017 by Mark Gabrish Conlan for Zenger’s
Newsmagazine • All rights reserved
NOTE: The title of this article comes from “Porto
Rican Chaos,” a song written by Duke Ellington and Juan Tizol and recorded by
Ellington in 1934. Link: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Zo48IldiqvQ
“President
Donald Trump is a racist and a white supremacist,” I wrote at the beginning of
my last major commentary on this blog about the Trump administration after the
bloody events in Charlottesville, Virginia in mid-August. The Trump
administration’s bizarre reaction to the devastation wreaked on Puerto Rico, an
island territory that is home to between 3.4 and 3.7 million U.S. citizens, is just one more demonstration that racism and
white supremacism are basic elements of Trump’s character. In fact, I would
argue that it’s become apparent that, contrary to Trump critics who’ve said
things like “Donald Trump doesn’t believe in anything but Donald Trump,” the
idea that people with lighter skin colors are innately superior to people with
darker skin colors is about the only thing outside himself in which Trump does believe.
What’s more,
other people besides me are finally willing to say that about Trump, too. I
practically had an orgasm in my living room when New York City Council Speaker
Melissa Mark-Viverito, discussing Trump’s failure to respond to Puerto Rico’s
plight — especially compared to the speed with which he came to the aid of
Texas, Louisiana and Florida when they
were hit by Hurricanes Harvey and Irma — said, “I mean, this is incredible, It
is racist, I truly believe it.” (The fact that Mark-Viverito is Puerto
Rican-born and still has family on the island only made it more poignant.)
Later, Will
Bunch of the Philadelphia Post-Inquirer
also used the R-word in relation to Trump in ways most of the mainstream media
have been dancing around for at least the 2 ½ years since he emerged as a major
figure, announcing for President and denouncing Mexican immigrants as rapists
and criminals (http://www.philly.com/philly/columnists/will_bunch/trumps-puerto-rico-potshots-make-his-racism-morally-impossible-to-ignore-20171001.html).
And more recently Dule University assistant professor Jay A. Pearson published
an article in the October 4 Los Angeles Times (http://www.latimes.com/opinion/op-ed/la-oe-pearson-trumps-textbook-racism-20171004-story.html)
that noted that of the seven types of racism scholars have identified —
structural, symbolic, institutional, interpersonal, insidious, internalized and
systemic — Trump exhibits them all.
After a weekend
in which he ignored the devastating impact of Maria on Puerto Rico and instead
spent it at his New Jersey golf course tweeting attacks on African-American
football players who dare not to stand for the national anthem of a country
that still treats them like second-class citizens, Bunch wrote, Trump issued
further threats against the leader of North Korea (another person of color!)
and “even dropped by a
gathering of local BMW dealers, the kind of guys that The Donald
feels comfortable around.”
But, Bunch
added, “Trump has also made it clear, during his White House stint, whom
he is not comfortable with: Anyone who criticizes him who happens to be Black,
Brown, or female — or some combination thereof. … So when San Juan Mayor
Carmen Yulín Cruz appeared on cable TV news — the only reality that matters in
Trump World — after wading through sewage-laden floodwaters with her bullhorn
looking for survivors, to state what has become painfully obvious in recent
days, that the federal response has been both inadequate and poorly managed and
that more help was needed to ‘save us from dying,’ the
president’s response — condescending, bitter, narcissistic and larded with
racism — managed to be both outrageous and tragically inevitable.”
I saw Carmen
Yulin Cruz’s response on MS-NBC the day she gave it, September 29, and I was so
profoundly moved by it I found myself wishing she’d run for the Democratic
Presidential nomination to run against Trump in 2020. (I’d love to see the poetic justice of Trump, who’s made it
much of his White House mission to wipe out as much as possible any hint of the
legacy of his African-American predecessor, replaced by someone who as a person
of color, a Latina and a woman, he considers a lower order of life than
himself.) The British newspaper The Guardian published a full transcript of her remarks at https://www.theguardian.com/world/2017/sep/29/san-juan-mayor-plea-donald-trump-puerto-rico,
and if you haven’t seen the entire clip on TV I strongly urge you to download
and read her whole statement.
“We are dying
here,” Yulín Cruz began, in an emotional but closely reasoned statement that
skewered the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) for imposing bizarre
bureaucratic requirements on her and other Puerto Rican mayors in order to
request aid. Holding two large binders filled with forms and procedures FEMA
agents were asking her to follow before they would even consider providing aid,
she said, “I have been very respectful of the FEMA employees. I have been
patient but we have no time for patience any more. So, I am asking the president
of the United States to make sure somebody is in charge that is up to the task
of saving lives. They were up the task in Africa when Ebola came over. They
were up to the task in Haiti [after the earthquake of 2010]. As they should be. Because when it comes to saving
lives we are all part of one community of shared values.”
Maybe Yulín Cruz
didn’t realize it, but she was not
appealing to a President who has any idea that he and she are “part of one
community of shared values.” From the day he came out of his mother’s
overprivileged womb, Donald John Trump, Sr. has been a spoiled brat, used to
getting his own way and regarding both his family’s money and his own (he began
with a fortune but managed through his own efforts to grow it) as
incontrovertible evidence that he is part of a higher order of humanity than
the peons who clean his apartment buildings, cut the lawns on his golf courses,
and serve meals and drinks at his casinos.
He’s the product
not only of a lucky accident at birth — what I said of Mitt Romney in 2012 is
true of Trump as well: “He became rich the way most people do it, by coming out
of the right womb” — but also of a hate-filled upbringing by his father, Fred
Trump, who was sued for discriminating against African-American tenants in his
buildings and called out as a racist in 1950 by none other than the great
folksinger Woody Guthrie. (Fred Trump had been active in racist politics since
1927, when he was one of seven people arrested at an upstate New York
demonstration in support of the Ku Klux Klan.)
Discriminating
against Black tenants was a part of the family business Donald Trump inherited
from his father — only by the time Donald did it it was the 1970’s and a
Democratic Congress and President, Lyndon Johnson, had made that sort of thing
a federal crime. The Trump Organization had to settle a lawsuit brought by the
federal government over their housing policies, though the terms of the
settlement were kept confidential. But Trump went right on being a racist, and
in 1989 when five young African-Americans were arrested for assault, rape and
sodomy against a 23-year-old white female investment banker in Central Park,
Trump took out a full-page ad in the New York Daily News headlined, “Bring back the death penalty. Bring back
our police!”
The ad, framed
as a slashing attack on moderate Democratic New York Mayor Ed Koch, read in
part, “Mayor Koch has stated that hate and rancor should be removed from our
hearts. I do not think so. I want to hate these muggers and murderers. They
should be forced to suffer ... Yes, Mayor Koch, I want to hate these murderers
and I always will. ... How can our great society tolerate the continued
brutalization of its citizens by crazed misfits? Criminals must be told that
their CIVIL LIBERTIES END WHEN AN ATTACK ON OUR SAFETY BEGINS!”
There was just
one problem: the five arrestees Trump had targeted in his ad turned out to be
innocent. After they had been convicted and given 8- to 15-year sentences, they
were finally exonerated in 2002 when another person confessed to the crime, and
DNA evidence bore him out. But, since being Donald Trump means (among other
things) never having to say you’re sorry, Trump opened his big mouth about the
case again when the New York city government authorized a $40 million settlement
of the lawsuit the unjustly convicted “Central Park Five” had brought against
the city. “Settling doesn’t mean innocence,” Trump wrote in an op-ed for the New
York Daily News. “Speak to the detectives
on the case and try listening to the facts. These young men do not exactly have
the pasts of angels.”
Trump has often
been criticized during his Presidency as lacking “empathy.” What these critics
don’t understand is that in Trump’s vicious, bullying, dog-eat-dog vision of
the world, “empathy” is not a virtue but a vice. The man who called his
(ghost-written) autobiography The Art of the Deal has never seen a deal as an agreement two parties reach because its
results would be mutually beneficial to both sides — which is why he’s so upset
with the agreement his predecessor cut with Iran. Trump sees a “deal” as a
weapon with which he crushes his adversary and forces him to submit to the
greater power and glory of Trump. He has also used whatever power he possessed
— as a businessman, a celebrity, a politician and now as President — not only
to impose his will on others but force them to flatter him and feed his
overweening ego.
That dynamic was
at work over the last few days, when Trump’s words for Puerto Rico’s governor, Ricardo Rosselló, couldn’t have been nicer. Because
Rosselló had said that FEMA had “executed quickly” on everything he’d asked
them for — even though he also said the aid would be more effective if the feds
sent more people to distribute it — he got the celebratory pat on the head and
a Milk-Bone treat from Trump. “I tell you, the governor of Puerto Rico
has been unbelievably generous with his praise,” Trump told reporters on the
White House lawn September 29. “I mean, he’s been praising our efforts.”
Of course,
Carmen Yelín Cruz got a very different response. Just hours after her statement
aired on TV, Trump tweeted, “The Mayor of San Juan,
who was very complimentary only a few days ago, has now been told by the
Democrats that you must be nasty to Trump.” It got even worse later when, in a
two-part tweet, Trump seemed to criticize not only Yelín Cruz but just about
everyone on Puerto Rico — or at least everyone who wasn’t groveling to him the
way Governor Rosselló was. It read, “Such poor leadership ability by the Mayor
of San Juan, and others in Puerto Rico, who are not able to get their workers
to help. They want everything to be done for them when it should be a community
effort. 10,000 Federal workers now on Island doing a fantastic job.”
“In his harsh
words, Trump managed to both embrace a tradition of white supremacist tropes in
American politics — remember
Reagan’s ‘welfare queens’ and ‘young bucks’? — and take that to a
nauseating new level, denigrating people of color as a dodge to excuse his own
not-so-benign neglect of Puerto Rico’s plight in the most pivotal moment,” Will
Bunch wrote in his October 1 Philadelphia Post-Inquirer column. “On Sunday morning, the president doubled down
with a new swipe, clearly aimed at the mayor and her supporters, as ‘ingrates.’
Let that sink in. This is the apotheosis of a trend … in which … prominent
Blacks or Hispanics who use their platform to advocate for social justice are
now ‘ingrates’ after all the riches that a white patriarchy has bestowed upon
them. This is the toxic underpinning behind Trump’s tweets, as our president
has sunk so low as to try to hold his political base together with increasingly
overt racism.”
The
Austerity Program
But there’s
something even more insidious about the backhanded treatment Trump has given to
Puerto Rico — especially contrasted with his willingness to do whatever it will
take to rebuild Texas and Florida (two U.S. states he carried in his 2016
Presidential election and which are key to his re-election chances in 2020) —
than out-front racism. It’s the factor that guides Trump in virtually every
decision he’s ever made in his life: “What’s in it for me?”
To understand,
you have to look at the whole sorry history of Puerto Rico and especially what
the island has been through in 2008, when it was hit especially hard by the
giant recession that gripped the country and helped spark the election of
Trump’s predecessor, Barack Obama. In order to keep services going to its
people while income, mostly from tourism, plummeted, the Puerto Rican
government ran up between $68 million and $75 million in debt.
The U.S.
Congress, which since Puerto Rico is a territory rather than a state has veto
power over anything the Puerto Rican government does (much like the power it
has over Washington, D.C.), passed something called the PROMESA Act in 2016
that basically treated Puerto Rico like a Third World country being forced into
economy-crippling “austerity” measures by the International Monetary Fund and
the World Bank. The PROMESA Act put all Puerto Rican spending under the control
of a five-member Financial Oversight and Management Board (FOMB), only two of
whose members are actually Puerto Rican.
According to Ed
Morales’ September 27 article from The Nation Web site (https://www.thenation.com/article/puerto-rico-needs-massive-emergency-aid-now-and-an-end-to-austerity/?utm_source=Sailthru&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=Daily%2009282017&utm_term=daily),
the PROMESA Act empowered FOMB (which Puerto Ricans call La Junta) “to restructure the island’s $68 billion debt,
address an additional $49 billion in pension obligations, and promote economic
development.” Morales gave FOMB kudos for releasing $1 billion of Puerto Rico’s
own money to Governor Rosselló for hurricane relief, but, he added, this is
“the proverbial drop in the bucket for a weary populace ravaged not only by
today’s bankruptcy and storms worsened by climate change, but by decades of
colonial neglect.”
The “solution”
to Puerto Rico’s economic woes imposed by the PROMESA Act has been tried
before. In the European Union, similar measures were imposed on Greece, tanking
its economy and sending it into a death spiral by which every new demand for
“austerity” took money out of the pockets of ordinary Greeks and made economic
recovery less, not more, likely. The IMF
and World Bank had been imposing similar conditions on other countries for
decades, with identical results.
The austerity
recipe was first tried in the U.S. in 1975 when New York City was on the verge
of bankruptcy. The huge financial institutions like Chase and First National
City (now Citibank) that held New York’s debt imposed what New York labor
leader Victor Gotbaum called “a junta of
bankers” that would have veto power over all the city government’s economic decisions,
including — most importantly from Gotbaum’s point of view — how much its
workers would be paid and under what conditions they would work. New York
eventually recovered, but the city’s progressives said this was in
spite of, not because of, the controls the
“junta of bankers” imposed on the
city government.
The American
Right seized on this as a nationwide model, arguing that when local governments
overspent the problem was due to irresponsible electorates, swayed by union
involvement in campaigns, that had elected politicians who had overspent their
available resources. The Right’s solution was to end democracy in local
government and put cities under state-appointed overseers with virtually
dictatorial powers. The most spectacular example was the state overseer
appointed by Michigan Governor Rick Snyder to run Flint, who in 2014 decided
that one way to save the state and city money was to stop buying water from
Detroit and instead get it from the polluted, lead-contaminated Flint River.
The result was that tens of thousands of Flint residents were exposed to lead
pollution and it took millions of dollars and three years of work to get the
lead content of Flint’s water down to safe levels.
One of the big
things overseers and boards like FOMB usually insist on is that as many city
services as possible be privatized. This is in line with the Right-wing
Libertarian idea that because private corporations are subject to the
discipline of “The Market” and the need to turn a profit, they are supposedly
more efficient and effective than government agencies. The reality is that
there are only two ways a private company can take over a service from a
government agency, run it at lower cost and still make a profit. One is to
lower the pay of the workers actually providing the services, and the other is
to lower the quality of the service — and in real-world privatizations, they
usually do both.
According to
Morales, even before Hurricane Maria hit Puerto Rico its water and sewer
services had already been partially privatized, “which resulted in increased
rates and poorer service.” Puerto Rico’s electric utility, which was $9 billion
in debt when Maria struck, had already been marked for privatization when the
hurricane cut power to 95 percent of the island and basically wiped out its
electrical grid. What’s more, the hurricane damage was so extensive the Puerto
Rican grid is likely to be down for months even if the money is found to repair
it — and, as Morales noted, a private investor would have even less incentive to
modernize the system, including putting the power lines underground (one of the
reasons Maria was so devastating to Puerto Rico’s electricity was the overhead
lines and the poles supporting them blew down in the storm), than a government
agency would.
“What Puerto
Rico needs is the kind of massive public investment that Washington provided in
the days of Franklin Roosevelt,” Morales wrote. “Reacting to the deadly
hurricanes that struck the island in 1928 and 1932, Roosevelt established the
Puerto Rico Reconstruction Administration, which created jobs, built schools
and medical facilities, expanded the university, and enhanced the electrical
infrastructure. Today’s monumental debt, an outgrowth of neoliberal excess,
should be resolved with some version of the plan proposed by Bernie Sanders in
his 2016 campaign: The Federal Reserve should buy back the debt from
bondholders and deny the vulture funds a profit, imposing the kind of severe
‘haircuts’ that the current Title III bankruptcy proceedings are unlikely to
require.”
Of course, that
ain’t going to happen — not with a Libertarian Republican Congress determined
to wipe out any vestige of the New Deal and return the U.S. to the 1880’s, when
corporations were absolute rulers, rich people routinely bought their way into
public office and used it to make themselves even richer, racial segregation
became the law of the land and organizing labor unions was illegal. Instead the
Trump administration has been dropping hints all over the place that the
interests of owners of Puerto Rican debt — many of them the people Morales
called “vultures,” who bought it for pennies on the dollar and now are
insisting on payment in full — are going to be more important to its plans for
Puerto Rico than the needs of the Puerto Rican people.
On September 25
President Trump’s press secretary, Sarah Huckabee Sanders, said that Tom
Bossert of the Department of Homeland Security and Brock Long of FEMA needed
time to conduct “a more thorough and deeper assessment of what needs there
are,” to make sure “we’re actually funding the correct things.” A senior
congressional aide suggested that “more thorough and deeper assessment” would
take until “the first or second week of October.” That night, Trump himself
sent word through Twitter that while “much of the island was destroyed,” Puerto
Rico’s billions of dollars of debt “owed to Wall Street … sadly, must be dealt
with.”
At least part of
that $68 to $75 billion debt — $33 million or so — is owed to Donald Trump
himself and his business. In 2008 the Trump Organization took over management
of a Puerto Rican golf resort, the Coco Beach Golf and Country Club, rebranding
it and putting Trump’s name on it. The resort had been built with $25.5 million
in bonds guaranteed by the Puerto Rican government as part of an overall plan
to boost high-end tourism to the island. By 2008 the golf resort was already
facing bankruptcy when Trump stepped in and offered to license the Trump name
and manage it in exchange for a share of its revenue. In 2011 the Puerto Rican
government issued $28 million in new bonds to refinance the original ones from
2001 and 2004 that had built the course in the first place. But Trump was
unable to turn the property around, and in 2015 the resort declared bankruptcy
and the land was sold to a private investment firm for about $2 million.
The Washington
Post’s fact-checker column reviewed this
history on October 1 (https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/fact-checker/wp/2017/09/30/did-president-trump-add-33-million-to-puerto-ricos-debt-by-bankrupting-a-golf-course-there/?utm_term=.21a93e9592d3),
and argued that the claim made on some Left-wing Web sites that Trump had
personally added $33 million to Puerto Rico’s debt burden was wrong. But even
if Trump’s comparatively measly $33 million didn’t add enough to Puerto Rico’s
debt burden to sink its economy, it certainly looks like all Trump’s warnings
to Puerto Rico that the debt the island “owe[s] to Wall Street … sadly, must be
dealt with” mean he intends to use the power of the Presidency to make sure
that he and all other holders of Puerto Rican debt are made whole, no matter
how devastating the consequences to the people of Puerto Rico.
[On October
4, Trump hinted that he would let Puerto Ricans “wave goodbye” to their $68 to
$75 million in state debt — see http://fortune.com/2017/10/04/puerto-rico-donald-trump-debt-bankruptcy/.
But, faced with an uproar from his good buddies on Wall Street, Trump, through
his budget director Mick Mulvaney, quickly backed away from any hope the
islanders may have had for debt forgiveness. Puerto Rico, Mulvaney said, “is
going to have to figure out how to fix the errors that it’s made.”]
Let ’Em Eat Paper Towels
I wrote the two
sections of the article above on the afternoon of October 1, hours before
Stephen Paddock crashed out a window of his 32nd-floor suite at the
Mandalay Bay resort hotel in Las Vegas and fired many rounds at concertgoers at
a country-music festival, killing 58 (along with himself, at the end of his
shooting spree) and wounding over 500 more. I also wrote it before President
Trump visited the sites of both tragedies — Hurricane María in Puerto Rico and
the shooting in Las Vegas — and had profoundly different responses to them.
In Vegas, where
most of the victims were white, he said the sorts of things you expect a
President to say when something really tragic happens to a large number of
Americans: “Our souls are stricken with grief for every American who lost a
husband or a wife, a mother or a father, a son or a daughter. We know that your
sorrow feels endless. We stand together to help you carry your pain. You’re not
alone. We will never leave your side.” You might question how sincere he is
about that — as Toronto Star Washington
correspondent Daniel Dale and former Republican Presidential speechwriter David
Frum did on Lawrence O’Donnell’s MS-NBC program October 4, just hours after
Trump made those remarks — but still, those are the sorts of things American
Presidents are supposed to say when hundreds, thousands or millions of their
constituents are hurting.
Trump’s
appearance in Puerto Rico October 3 couldn’t have been more different. Before
an invited audience of mayors and community leaders from across the island, he
said, “I hate to tell you, Puerto Rico, but you’ve thrown our budget a little
out of whack. Because we’ve spent a lot of money on Puerto Rico, and that’s
fine. We’ve saved a lot of lives. If you look at the — every death is a horror,
but if you look at a real catastrophe like Katrina, and you look at the
tremendous, hundreds and hundreds of people that died. And you look at what
happened here with what was really a storm that was totally overpowering —
nobody’s ever seen anything like it.”
He was giving
his administration and its disaster-relief effort, such as it’s been, credit
for holding down the death toll in Puerto Rico to 16. Later the island’s
governor, Ricardo Rosselló, raised it to 34, and with 95 percent of the island
still without electrical power or reliable supplies of food and water it’s
likely to climb even higher. Then, in a bizarre spectacle that reminded some
people of Marie Antoinette’s famous remark when told that the people of France
had no bread, “Then let them eat cake” (though Marie Antoinette probably never
said that; it was an urban legend about clueless royals for at least 100 years
before her time) and other people of the way zookeepers throw food to the
animals at mealtime, he started tossing rolls of paper towels and other items
at the crowd.
As he’d been in
his public statements before he visited Puerto Rico, Trump seemed to assess the
quality of any individual Puerto Rican leader on the basis of how much they
were willing to flatter him and feed his insatiable ego. He essentially lined
up the mayors and other island leaders and forced them to praise him. He’d done
the same thing with his own Cabinet at that bizarre June 13 meeting (http://www.cnn.com/2017/06/12/politics/donald-trump-cabinet-meeting/index.html),
where his secretaries had to prove their fealty to him in a round-robin
praise-fest that sounded like someone Shakespeare would have written about a
particularly corrupt royal court — except that Shakespeare would at least have
come up with better-sounding dialogue.
Once again,
Governor Rosselló came up with what Trump considered the “right” answer. “Your
governor has been — who I didn’t know, I heard very good things about him,”
Trump recalled. “He’s not even from my party, and he started right at the
beginning, appreciating what we did. And, Governor, I just want to tell you
that right from the beginning, this governor did not play politics. He didn’t
play it at all. He was just saying it like it was, and he was giving us the
highest praise.” As he’d done before he came to Puerto Rico, he was basically
giving Governor Rosselló his pat on the head and his Milk-Bone treat for saying
what a wonderful job Trump, his administration and his FEMA people were doing.
Every Trump story
needs a villain, and in this case the villain was the Mayor of San Juan, Carmen
Yulín Cruz. He saw her in his receiving line and asked, “How are you?”
Yulín Cruz, clearly
bristling at the implied criticism Trump was giving her for daring to question
the competence of Trump’s relief effort compared to Governor Rosselló’s
willingness to kiss Trump’s royal ring (or a somewhat lower part of his
anatomy), challenged Trump’s implication that she, unlike Rosselló, was playing
politics with the crisis. “Sir, it’s all about saving lives,” she said. “It’s
not about politics.
“Thank you.
Thank you, everybody,” Trump said to the assembled crowd of Puerto Rican
leaders and journalists. That quick “thank you” and subsequent exit have become
well known as the way Trump and his officials signal that the Royal Audience is over.
Yulín Cruz did
an interview with Joy Reid during Rachel Maddow’s time slot on MS-NBC October 3
in which she clearly wanted to tell as positive a story as possible. She cited
the tremendous outpouring of support she has received from people on the
American mainland. “Ever since last Thursday, things started picking up, a lot
because of private donations,” she said. “People have [been] overcome with
solidarity, and [people, including mayors, in] Chicago, Illinois; Miami Beach;
Los Angeles; New York; Boston [have supported and donated]. Private
organizations and nongovernmental organizations like Operation Blessing have
just been bringing loads and loads of food and water.”
She also praised
the members of Trump’s White House staff, who not only haven’t brought the
patronizing attitude of their boss but actually have helped. “I really felt
that the second part of the meetings today, with the White House staff, were
conducive to just sort of bridging the gap between the disconnect of what they
say is happening — by the way, the Pentagon does not agree with their
assessment — and what really is happening,” Yulín Cruz said. “And I think that
disconnect is really, that gap got closed a lot more by talking to five mayors
that were there, and we were able to also propose solutions to some of the
logistical problems and issues that have been brought up.”
Yulín Cruz also
said that as more donations of food, water and supplies have come in, she’s
been able not only to help San Juan’s residents but send aid out to other, more
far-flung municipalities in more remote parts of Puerto Rico. She also held up
her smartphone and said that one of the biggest problems Puerto Rico faces from
the hurricane is that the storm took out most of the island’s electrical power,
making phones useless and giving authorities no way to let people know that
help is available, or if they need to evacuate. “Even if [Puerto Ricans] have a
phone in their pocket, it doesn’t work,” she explained. “So this lack of
interconnectivity is one of the main and primary reasons things have not been
able to be picked up. But by God, you go to Timbuktu, you put in a satellite
dish and you make communications happen.”
But Joy Reid
wouldn’t let her off the hook in terms of talking about Trump. Noting that he
“didn’t respond” to her comment that her actions were about saving lives, not
politics, Yulín Cruz called Trump’s appearance “a PR 17-minute meeting. There
was no exchange with anybody, with none of the mayors, and in fact this
terrible and abominable view of him throwing paper towels and throwing
provisions at people. It does not embody the spirit of the American nation, you
know. That is not the home of the free, the land of the brave, the beacon of
democracy that people have learned to look up to, you know, across the world.”
If nothing else,
their profoundly different responses to Puerto Rico’s life-threatening crisis
shows the difference in character between Mayor Yulín Cruz and President Trump
— and the very different visions of America they represent. Yulín Cruz’s
America is one in which people roll up their sleeves and help each other in
need. “I lived in Boston. I lived in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. I gave birth
there, and I know that the American people are brave people,” Yulín Cruz told
Rachel Maddow on an earlier MS-NBC broadcast September 29. “They’re
whole-hearted people, and they just charge. When something is not [working],
they invent it. If you have to move it, you move it. If you have to go around
it, you go around it.”
Trump’s world is
a dog-eat-dog one in which all his actions have one and only one goal: the
greater glory and enrichment (financial and
psychological) of Donald J. Trump. I already noted above that whenever he’s
criticized for lacking “empathy,” his critics don’t understand that he regards
that as a compliment. For Trump, empathy and compassion are the so-called
“virtues” of wimps. The lessons Trump learned from the two most important and
powerful male influences on him in his life — his father and the unscrupulous
super-attorney and former Senator Joseph McCarthy staff member Roy Cohn, who
mentored Trump in his successful transition from small-time real-estate
developer in the outer boroughs to baron in the empyrean heights of Manhattan —
were to take whatever advantage you can of everybody and screw them before they can screw you.
That’s one
reason that as I was writing the final parts of this article, Trump announced
his intention to scrap the nuclear arms limitation deal with Iran so carefully
negotiated by his predecessor, Barack Obama, and Obama’s secretary of state,
John Kerry, in association with the U.N. Security Council, the European Union,
and virtually the whole rest of the world. Trump called the Iran deal “not in
the best interest of the United States,” just as he denounced the Paris
agreement on climate change by saying, “I was elected to represent Pittsburgh,
not Paris.” (The mayor of Pittsburgh, whose voters broke 9 to 1 for Hillary
Clinton over Trump, immediately denounced Trump and said his city had seen the
light of the future, moved away from its “Steeltown” past and charted an
economically viable strategy for a post-industrial age.)
The man who
wrote — or at least had his name on — the book The Art of the Deal doesn’t view a deal as a mutually satisfactory
agreement that benefits all parties to it. Trump defines the word “deal” as a
business transaction in which he gets all the benefits and the other party or
parties suffer abject and humiliating defeat. That’s why he’s so opposed to the
Iran deal, because while the U.S. and the rest of the world might have got
something desirable out of it (a delay of at least a decade in Iran’s ability
to develop a nuclear weapon), Iran got something out of it too (release of frozen
Iranian funds held by the U.S. and a partial lifting of U.S. and U.N. sanctions
against their country).
It’s been hard
to pin down Donald Trump — is he a sleight-of-hand artist? A juggler with an
uncommon ability to keep several balls in the air at once and confuse his
audience about which one is “really” important? A narcissist? An egomaniac? A
psychopath? A man who, like the Joker in the Batman series film The Dark
Knight, “just wants to watch the world
burn”? A small-time New York developer in way over his head in the most powerful — and most
responsible — job in the world? A leader whose fierce loyalty to the people who
put him in office deserves at least a twisted sort of admiration?
But one thing is
clear: every day he wields the power of the presidency of the United States is
a bad day for the world, a day where his overweening ego and continual need for
fulsome praise brings the human race closer to military, economic or
environmental disaster. When I saw Mayor Carmen Yulín Cruz, a person I’d never
heard of until about a week ago, step forward on TV and plead for help for her
people while she was walking around in galoshes through flooded streets,
getting her hands dirty both literally and figuratively in a way Donald Trump
never has in his entire life, I thought, “That is what I want my country’s leader to be.”
I want to live
in Carmen Yelín Cruz’s America. I’m stuck living in Donald Trump’s.
