When fired FBI director James Comey chose a title for his new book, “A Higher Loyalty,” he made the point that President Donald Trump was way out of line when he asked Comey to pledge loyalty.
In making that request, Trump was putting himself above the director’s oath of office to “support and defend the Constitution of the United States.” In reply, Comey said “You will always get honesty from me.”
Loyalty is one of those flexible words in which meaning may change depending on the speaker and the situation. Was Trump’s tough-guy (“You’re fired!”) advice to NFL team owners the right response to many African-American players taking a knee during our national anthem?
To whom were these football players disloyal?
Not to their country or the Constitution’s First Amendment. Not to their team, which pays them to play ball at some risk. Not to their race, because injustice was common experience. Not to fair-minded fans that just wanted them to play well. Their high purpose was protesting endemic police violence.
In 1967, 50 years before any black football player took a knee, President Lyndon B. Johnson addressed race in America. He had already pushed through the Civil Rights Act and the Voting Rights Act, but the problem of inequality never left.
In 1968, President Johnson’s Kerner Commission closed with the conclusion that “our nation is moving toward two societies, one black, one white — separate and unequal.” The 11-member commission, chaired by Gov. Otto Kerner Jr. of Illinois, identified 150 riots or major disorders between 1965 and 1968.
Newark and Detroit were among the deadliest. In 1992, I saw what was left of Detroit 24 years later. The Motor City’s neighborhoods were burned-out shells left to rot.
The report blamed the riots on black frustration at the lack of economic opportunity. Martin Luther King Jr. pronounced the report as a “physician’s warning of approaching death, with a prescription for life.” King’s assassination followed one month later, and in response — 100 cities burned.
The Kerner Commission’s prescription berated federal and state governments for failed housing, education and social-service policies. In seeming forecast of the Fox News climate of today, it blamed the mainstream media for looking at the world through white men’s eyes and white perspective. How much has changed in 50 years?
Speaking of President Trump is painful, but a citizen’s duty for those of us who follow the news. Our president has turned out to be a Manchurian Candidate in thrall to an enemy state — Russia.
Trump is far more than his well-known reputation of being morally bankrupt and a fervent liar; the country can handle that. What’s worse is his treasonous transition from opinionated rich guy to the definition of those taken in by Communist propaganda.
Trump is Vladimir Lenin’s “useful idiot” in the flesh.
Which reminds me of what I once heard a party regular say about an office-holder of limited brain. “Yes, he may be an idiot, but he’s our idiot!” Vladimir Putin has to be thinking exactly that of his chump, Trump.
I take no joy in pointing out the obvious to the Valley’s thoughtful readers. However, it’s my job with that of everyone else to reach out and convey what’s happening to the uninformed voters among us. I find it difficult to take onboard Trump’s tramp through the G7 in Canada, where he justified new tariffs by designating our northern neighbor a national security threat. Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau was dead right when he reminded our president that Canada was our ally on D-Day in 1944, and many other battles right up to today.
Trump strangely proposed that Russia be invited to rejoin the group, despite being thrown out for cause. In 1961 John Fitzgerald Kennedy asked history “to be the final judge of our deeds.” JFK believed that history was always to be our measure.
It would help if Trump read books.
Trump’s next stop was Brussels, where he blustered through a breakfast photo-op by loudly castigating our allies about their unpaid NATO dues. A pay schedule was set two years ago. Northing changed. He couldn’t leave without misstating the European Union as a trading foe of the United States.
Next stop, a jolly meeting with British Prime Minister Theresa May. The PM brought out the Household Cavalry to parade for her visitor. The queen condescended to have Donald and Melania to tea at Windsor.
In the meantime, his image in the shape of a diapered Baby Trump balloon flew above thousands of no-Trump demonstrators in Trafalgar Square.
Trump gave an interview to Fox News Rupert Murdoch’s tabloid paper, The Sun. In it Trump praised Boris Johnson, Britain’s just-resigned Brexit-fan foreign secretary. Later, Trump denied saying anything against “Theresa.”
A woman reporter asked Trump if such insults were his understanding of the long-standing British-American “special relationship?”
Unbelievably, it was even worse in Helsinki. Putin’s poodle was the kindest slam about the abject humiliation of our American president abroad. In leaving he was still parroting Joseph Stalin’s opinion of a free press as “the enemy of the people.” No doubt it’s true because reporters have been killed in Russia. Also, minutes before the Putin-Trump press conference, a vetted journalist was hoisted from his seat and thrown out —cameras rolling.
Obviously, he too wasn’t loyal enough. Who’s next?
Jim Cahillane, of Williamsburg, follows the news on BBC, Fox and MSNBC, and in the Daily Hampshire Gazette, The New York Times and online. He is loyal to NESN.