President’s Trump’s tweets serve several functions. They fire up his political base, in part because they enrage his Democratic opponents.
They also cause obvious discomfort for many of his would-be allies in the Republican Party. But they have another effect, too: They distract from some of the more sinister aspects of the man in the Oval Office. And they have been very effective thus far.
It is time for Americans in general, and Republicans in particular, to wake up to the genuine menace of President Trump. Even his supporters concede that his behavior is erratic, often boorish, incompetent, and a threat to liberal values.
But Trump may well be worse, far worse. Last month we all got a glimpse of why this is so. Speaking before a large gathering of police officers in suburban New York, Trump urged the officers, with a wink and a nod, not to be “too nice” when arresting suspects.
The White House deflected questions about this apparent encouragement to police brutality with the claim that the president “was just joking.” But this so-called joke fits well with Trump’s rabble-rousing at his rallies during the election, urging supporters to rough up demonstrators. And there is startling evidence of even more violent tendencies in this president.
We have known for some time that Trump admires Vladimir Putin as “a strong leader.” He has defended the Russian leader against allegations, made by many international organizations, that Putin has ordered the murders of political opponents and journalists.
In a February TV interview with Bill O’Reilly, Trump seemed to make the outrageous claim that American presidents have done the same as Putin. This was largely glossed over as just so much more “Trump being Trump,” as if a murder accusation by the occupant of the Oval Office against unspecified predecessors should simply be laughed off.
Could there be something more sinister here? I want neither to sound alarmist nor to endorse conspiracy theories, and I myself dismissed Trump’s claim to O’Reilly as so much nonsense, not worth getting worked up about. Trump could not really be excusing, much less endorsing, presidential murder, could he? But there is incontrovertible evidence that he is capable of just that, evidence that has been staring us in the face for several months, with scarcely any notice.
On April 29, Trump called Rodrigo Duterte, president of the Philippines, in order, as he said (I quote from the official transcript, available online), “to congratulate you because I am hearing of the unbelievable job on the drug problem. Many countries have this problem, we have a problem, but what a great job you are doing and I just wanted to call and tell you that.”
The man Trump congratulated has proudly compared himself to Hitler, expressing his desire to slaughter 3 million drug addicts and dealers in his country. Our own U.S. State Department’s 2016 Human Rights Report states that Philippine police and vigilantes had already on Duterte’s orders killed more than 6,000 suspected drug dealers and users in what amounts to a policy of extra-judicial massacre. Duterte is proud of his achievement as a self-confessed mass murderer, and the president of the United States called to congratulate him on his “great” and “unbelievable job,” and has invited him to visit in the White House.
During the campaign and then again more recently, Trump has promised to deal with the opioid crisis in the U.S. But what has he done instead? He has proposed cutting billions from programs that address the crisis.
Try to put yourself in the shoes of the parents of addicted children, some of whom voted for Trump on the basis of those campaign promises. What must you think when he praises the “great and unbelievable job” of his Philippine counterpart, whose approach to the crisis is to order the extermination of drug users and dealers alike, as if they were so much vermin?
Some may want to claim that Trump was not being sincere in his praise of Duterte, that he was only flattering the man in order to achieve some other goal which we should approve or at least perhaps condone. What might that goal be? One possibility is to shore up a traditional U.S. alliance that under Duterte has grown shaky. Yet another theory is that Trump’s true aim is to ensure the business success of his nearly completed Trump Tower in Manila.
In any of these cases, we have to consider that the president of the most powerful nation on Earth, a nation that prides itself on its moral and religious heritage, called a murderous counterpart in the Far East, lavishly praised him, and repeatedly invited him to the White House, thereby signaling that the United States of America has only praise for a policy of mass murder. A moral leader, a person of good character, would have to ask himself before uttering such praise, how many more will die as a result of this phone call?
Whatever his motive might have been, the only conclusion I can draw from all this is that Donald J. Trump is a far more dangerous man than most of us, myself included, have recognized.
He is not just a buffoon, to be laughed at on “Saturday Night Live.” He is not simply a vulgar, self-confessed sexual predator and xenophobe.
If the rule of law and the lives of thousands of Filipinos, whose only crime might be to have become addicted to drugs, matter so little to Trump that he would sacrifice them for any likely motive, what is to stop him from similar behavior elsewhere when it suits his interests?
It is time for all our nation’s leaders — from politics, business, the arts, Democrats and especially Republicans — to condemn this kind of behavior in no uncertain terms.
In our politically polarized times, Republicans and Democrats often speak hyperbolically of one another as dangerous. Donald Trump transcends that phenomenon. He represents a completely new kind of menace, something we all thought could not happen here.
John M. Connolly, of Haydenville, is the Sophia Smith professor of philosophy emeritus at Smith College.