Leaders
The JC Leader extra: Trump's day of shame
On just one day — Friday 27th January 2017 — President Trump managed to shame his office not once but twice.
January 30, 2017 11:53
2 min read
On just one day — Friday 27th January 2017 — President Trump managed to shame his office not once but twice.
January 30, 2017 11:53There is an oft-cited phrase, first coined by Mario Cuomo, that politicians campaign in poetry and govern in prose.
A variation of this needs to be employed when considering Donald Trump. The US president campaigned with a dog whistle and is governing in bigotry.
On just one day – Friday 27th January – President Trump managed to shame his office not once but twice.
First, his executive order barring entry to the US to citizens of seven primarily Muslim states was rightly described by Benjamin Wittes, a legal expert at the bipartisan Brookings Institution, as a combination of malevolence and incompetence. Malevolence, because the list of countries affected shows that it has nothing to do with security and everything to do with bigotry and internal political positioning. Syrian victims of Russian bombing are prevented even from applying for refuge. And yet citizens of those nations which have conducted acts of terrorism on US soil – such as Saudi Arabia and Egypt – are unaffected.
And incompetence, because its drafting is so appalling – it was deliberately kept by the White House from review by the Department of Homeland Security, the Justice Department, the State Department the Department of Defense and lawyers at the National Security Council - that it has already been pulled apart for its glaring inconsistencies. As Mr Wittes points, out, President Trump has created “a target-rich environment for litigation”.
It is difficult – impossible even – to see this as anything other than a piece of political posturing designed to show a portion of the US electorate that President Trump meant what he said in the campaign about targeting Muslims. The fact that others will be caught in the fall out is a matter of supreme indifference to the administration.
That alone would be enough to confirm all the worries this newspaper expressed on President Trump’s election in November. But it was not alone.
On Friday, the White House issued a statement for Holocaust Memorial Day that was as sly as it was disgusting.
Holocaust denial takes many forms. The traditional form – denial that the Holocaust ever occurred – is now so clearly the preserve only of cranks and antisemites that a newer formulation has developed. Deniers now attempt to widen it to being an attack on “all who suffered” (as the White House put it last week), with Jews merely one of the many victims.
Superficially this may seem inclusive. In reality, it is a deliberate tactic to remove the very meaning of the Holocaust. It is the tactic of those who argue that the Jews somehow ‘use’ the Holocaust to give themselves ‘special status’ as victims. In other words, it is the tactic of antisemites.
Any charitable explanation of the statement – that it was the result of the same incompetence that is seen in the drafting of the same day’s executive order on entry into the US – was destroyed by the weekend’s follow up by Hope Hicks, the White House’s Director of Strategic Communications.
Ms Hicks said that the refusal to mention the Jews in a statement for Holocaust Memorial Day was intentional: “Despite what the media reports, we are an incredibly inclusive group and we took into account all of those who suffered.”
The White House took the deliberate step of issuing a statement for HMD that did not mention Jews – reflecting precisely that more recent strain of Holocaust Denial.
Shameful does not even come close.
