The Trump Whisperers
Since Trump’s first run for office, one of his “virtues” oft-touted by his disciples has been that he is plain spoken. He says what’s on his mind. For better or worse.
However, what he says is often contradictory. Or mired in rambling sequences which sound conversational but are anything but “plain”.
And so rose the Trump Whisperers.
His pronouncements range from the serious to the bizarre. We’re often told he jokes. But the flat delivery can leave everyone guessing as to what the actual punchline might be.
His interpreters fall along the same broad spectrum. From Fox news hosts twisting themselves into knots to make his words palatable to a mainstream audience to the mystical proclamations of QAnon.
This verbal trickery is often used to soften his words when they veer into pure malice and cruelty or to add supposed nuance to indecipherable phrases and undeniable false claims.
But what happens when there is no room for interpretation?
Trump’s seemingly off the cuff remark that he planned to “own the Gaza Strip” was a literal jaw dropping moment for his Chief of Staff, Susie Wiles. On camera, her facial expression went full anime.
(Someone should do a welfare check on her as she hasn’t been seen since.)
Immediately, pundits raced to interpret this new claim. Did he mean it? Would he actually go there? The candidate who ran on ending overseas entanglement and “America First” calling for an emptying and occupation of Gaza?
The Fox news comments section, normally an obsequious flood of praise and admiration fell into a stuttering crisis of faith when the story posted. Ultimately deciding this was yet again one of those instances where Trump’s strategic vision was so blindingly visionary, he should be granted the “works in mysterious ways” pass reserved for higher beings.
But in the time since, Trump has repeated this daft idea enough that people have begun to understand he’s serious.
That the plan isn’t some expert negotiating tactic ripped from his ghost-written book about deal making. He fully intends to remove Gazans from their home and develop the most contentious strip of property in the world into a beachside resort.
Condemnation came instantly from anybody not flailing for an inoffensive translation. The Trump Whisperers settled on it being an innovative strategy to break up an unsolvable problem. But none of them have discussed the sheer impossibility of carrying out this insanity.
None.
It’s as if decades of the U.S. being embroiled in regime change and intervention in the Middle East never happened. 9–11 and nearly twenty years of war in Afghanistan completely forgotten.
Would the room rates at this resort include ransom fees for your kidnappers or ballistic vest and helmet for those walks on the beach? Maybe an IED sniffing dog for an upgrade?
Instead of pointing out the sheer absurdity of this proposal, we have one side condemning it as ethnic cleansing and the other touting it as a bold strategy.
Common sense has completely deserted the narrative. But the takeaway here is that Trump is saying exactly what he means to do.
The interpreters fell silent again when he issued an executive order regarding “egregious actions of the republic of South Africa.” A stunned quiet and one into which the opposition seemed reluctant to state the obvious.
Why? Because they’ve been told they lost for calling people racist.
In the middle of his intense crackdown on immigration, Trump wants to prioritize the settlement of white South Africans who, he claims, are the subject of “reverse racism.” White South Africans displaced because they ran a fifty year regime of Apartheid leveled against the majority black citizenry.
(It’s almost as if they are discovering meritocracy is a false narrative. That once they have everything taken away from them, rising back to the top is difficult to impossible.)
Regardless, the inner politic of South Africa is complex, informed by a turbulent history of racial segregation much like our own. Post-Civil War when we ended Reconstruction too early at the behest of political pressure, it led to the Jim Crow era and a wave of racial violence across the country along with the rise of the KKK to political prominence.
But what is one to make of an administration decrying diversity as a mortal sin and declaring a color blind meritocracy but who are now advocating for the deportation of brown people and a favored status for a group of whites?
Shouldn’t we accept South Africans based solely on merit by these new standards?
So far, Trump has ended most other refugee programs. Venezuelans, Haitians, even Afghans who fought alongside our soldiers against a brutal Taliban regime.
But he wants to carve out an exception for a group of white South Africans…
Do I need to spell this out?
He’s once again telling us exactly who he is. Exactly what he plans to do. How he envisions the future of this country. No need to find a Trump Whisperer to explain what he really intends.
Act accordingly.
