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Clarence Lusane, Racial Genetics Is Trump’s Defining Worldview (Full Stop!)

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Hey, the clip was “erroneously” posted at Donald Trump’s Truth Social website, right? You know, the one I mean, the 62-second video clip (to the tune of “The Lion Sleeps Tonight”) that featured Barack and Michelle Obama with ape heads, the one that the president felt there was simply no need to explain or in any way say he was sorry for. You know, the very one where, despite later deleting it from his account, he insisted, “No, I didn’t make a mistake.” Meanwhile, as NPR reported, “White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt defended the clip, saying, ‘Please stop the fake outrage.'”

Oh, right, it’s certainly fake outrage — but only, of course, if you happen to live in a distinctly White supremacist world. In that case, you’d certainly shrug off Michelle Obama’s response that “it’s his same old con, doubling down on ugly, misogynistic, racist lies as a substitute for real ideas and solutions that will actually make people’s lives better.”

How could the outrage not be fake when you’re talking about the president who wants to toss every immigrant he can find, who is not from Denmark, Norway, or Sweden, out of the country — oh, sorry, with the exception of White immigrants from South Africa? (“Why can’t we have some people from Norway, Sweden, just a few? Let’s have a few from Denmark… Send us some nice people.”)

Of course, Donald Trump is not exactly alone in the history of American presidents. After all, 111 years ago, Woodrow Wilson screened a movie, The Birth of a Nation, that glorified the Ku Klux Klan in the East Room of the White House. And with all of that (and so much more) in mind, let TomDispatch regular Clarence Lusane take you into a world in which Donald Trump learned all too much about race from… yes, of course, Jeffrey Epstein. Tom

Donald Trump’s Racism Mirrors Jeffrey Epstein’s

The President with the “Right Genes”

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Jeffrey Epstein was not only a rapist and a child predator, but also -- wait for it -- a White supremacist. While some speculate that the Epstein issue is just a distraction from President Trump’s virulent and endless racism, others feel that the video the president posted at the beginning of Black History Month of Barack and Michelle Obama as apes was meant to divert attention from the growing Epstein fallout. Well, as it turns out, the two crises are not as far apart as you might imagine.

Bombshell articles in The Atlantic, Mother Jones, and at MS Now pulled the covers off Jeffrey Epstein’s noxious racism. Reporters culling the most recently released Epstein files discovered numerous pieces of evidence in emails and other documents suggesting that he advocated the faux “science” of racial eugenics and held racist views not distinct from those promoted for decades by Donald Trump. Epstein built (or at least tried to build) ties and develop friendships with some of the most notorious eugenicists and White nationalists around the globe, including Nobel Prize laureate and geneticist James Watson, political scientist Charles Murray, and artificial intelligence researcher Joscha Bach, among many others. He also circulated posts from White supremacist websites that promoted bogus, supposedly genetically-based intellectual differences between the races.

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Alfred W. McCoy, How the Past Whispers to the Present in Iran

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Honestly, I can barely believe that I’m living through it again. After all, I began TomDispatch in the wake — a distinctly appropriate word — of an American president (George W. Bush) ordering the invasion of Afghanistan after the 9/11 attacks and, remind me, how did that turn out? Now, here I am, 24 years later, with an American president — and the “peace president” at that — launching attacks on and a possible war against Iran. If it weren’t so bloody and painful, it would almost be comic. The supposedly greatest imperial power of this era (and perhaps any era, since no other country, historically, had quite so much power and influence globally as the United States did at the height of its ascendancy) is now visibly shooting itself in the foot (if not the head).

And mind you, all of this is happening on a planet where war and the fossil fuel emissions it releases in such staggering quantities only help ensure that not just one great power but the whole planet will be heading down, too. And one of the more striking things that Donald Trump’s strange imperial actions — from Venezuela to Iran — have been doing is taking attention away from what’s happening to this planet right now. I mean, did you even notice that recently the world’s largest iceberg, known as A23a, which once was more than twice the size of greater London, has essentially melted away in the Southern Atlantic Ocean in the growing heat of this moment? Or that, for the first time, there are mosquitoes in Iceland, which has had record high temperatures this year (and that the only place without them now is Antarctica)?

No, of course not! Not when President Trump’s assault on Iran (and so much else that he does) invariably steals the headlines, day after day, while, among other things, he devastatingly revokes “a scientific finding that climate change is a danger to public health.” Honestly, we couldn’t be in a more unnerving world, could we? Well, maybe we could — and that’s a truly frightening thought! And while that’s on your mind, check out TomDispatch regular Alfred McCoy’s latest look at our mad president in this strange moment of distinct imperial decline — and while you’re at it, get your hands on his remarkable new book (which I can proudly say I edited), Cold War on Five Continents: A Global History of Empire and Espionage. I do consider it a must-read! Tom

Imperial Decline in the Straits of Hormuz

The Iran War as America’s Very Own Suez Crisis

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In the first chapter of his 1874 novel The Gilded Age, Mark Twain offered a telling observation about the connection between past and present: “History never repeats itself, but the… present often seems to be constructed out of the broken fragments of antique legends.”

Among the “antique legends” most helpful in understanding the likely outcome of the current U.S. intervention in Iran is the Suez Crisis of 1956, which I describe in my new book Cold War on Five Continents. After Egyptian leader Gamal Abdel Nasser nationalized the Suez Canal in July 1956, a joint British-French armada of six aircraft carriers destroyed Egypt’s air force, while Israeli troops smashed Egyptian tanks in the sands of the Sinai Peninsula. Within less than a week of war, Nasser had lost his strategic forces and Egypt seemed helpless before the overwhelming might of that massive imperial juggernaut.

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Juan Cole, Trump and the Return of the White Man’s Burden

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Once again, the “President of Peace” Donald Trump who, while running for office in 2016, announced that “regime change is a proven, absolute failure,” has taken out after “the natives,” eager to change regimes in distant lands. These days, of course, the country on which he’s particularly focused is Iran, parts of which he’s been blasting to smithereens. Last year, as Al-Jazeera reported, he managed to bomb (at least in passing) seven countries: Iran, Iraq, Nigeria, Somalia, Syria, Yemen, and Venezuela. And now, of course, he’s been battering Iran in an all-too-striking fashion. And if, leaving aside the modern technology of destruction involved, this reminds you of European powers and the United States dealing with those same “natives” in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries via what then passed for “gunboat diplomacy,” no surprise there.

As he showed in Venezuela this year, capturing its president (and his wife) at the point of… well, not a sword, of course, but bombs and even a secret weapon he labeled “the Discombobulator,” once he makes up his mind to be Donald Trump, president of the planet, nothing can stand in his way. (Or perhaps I mean that nothing can remain standing in his way.) And remember, we’re not even a year and a half into his second term in office. So just imagine seven countries a year for almost three years to come and, while you’re at it, try to imagine the planet we’re likely to find ourselves on by then.

It should take your breath away. And while you’re thinking about Donald Trump’s urge to take us all into an airborne version of a distinctly colonial past in a particularly chaotic fashion, let TomDispatch regular Juan Cole, who runs the remarkable Informed Comment website, remind you of the role that White nationalism, an old favorite of colonial powers past, is once again playing in the Trump era in which so much that was old is new again. Sigh. Tom

“The Horror! The Horror!”

Colonial Nostalgia and Aryan Reliability

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Under President Donald J. Trump, the United States has now become an engine for the promulgation of White nationalism. Not since the 1930s has such an ideology, which exalts those ethnic groups it codes as "White," while denigrating all others, underpinned the domestic and foreign policies of a major world power. Typically (for our moment), Trump’s recent National Security Strategy (NSS) depicted Europe as in distinct “civilizational decline" because of the European Union’s commitment to multiracial democracy and international humanitarian law. These days, thanks to its racial policies, the Trump team even finds a way to inject racial hatred into dry economic statistics, complaining that “Continental Europe has been losing share of global GDP [gross domestic product] -- down from 25 percent in 1990 to 14 percent today.”

A Mayor Named Khan

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