The Mystery of Donald Trump and the Poisoned Blood!

Donald Trump’s Christmas gift to America–and the world–was the following: “They are poisoning the blood of our country,” Trump said about immigrants. “And I’m not talking about a specific group… they’re destroying our country. They’re coming in from every continent, and we have no idea, we have no idea who they are, what they represent. Are they from jails? Are they from prisons? And I will tell you, a big percentage of the people coming in are from prisons and from mental institutions and are terrorists. And we cannot let that… and that is poisoning our country.”

Hmm, let us think about Trump’s rambling words for a moment as we consider that Melania Knauss (Trump) hails from Novo Mesto, Slovenia. Why, she’s a foreigner! An immigrant! Thus we have every reason to believe–according to Donald–that their son, Barron has poisoned blood. It stands to his tortured reason, does it not? Not only that, but she and Trump were married (2005) even before she became a US citizen (2006). The horror! Even the dictator that Trump so often mimicks (Adolf Hitler) never married a foreigner. Good grief!

Sadly–and obviously–Trump has neither self-critical capacity nor any real self-knowledge. Otherwise he would be less likely to come out with such tripe. What is worse, there are some tens of millions of his devotees in the US who also lack critical thinking. I would like to think that their xenophobic proclivities are simply based on ingnorance of history and facts; that they do not realise what Hitler and his nazis were intent on doing from the things they said before they came to power. But then one sees footage of the rallies of Trump supporters, with swastikas and Confederate battle flags bandied about. And I realise that too many people follow Trump precisely because he is a Hitler for the 21st century. It’s worth adding that as an undergraduate, my German language project was to translate all of Hitler’s radio broadcasts between 1933 and the outbreak of war in 1939. Thus I am very well acquainted with his racist rhetoric and that of his orange acolyte.

I myself am an immigrant (x2). I left the US decades ago for life in the UK, and later I immigrated to France. But in between the two, my wife and I decided to try the US again. We arrived in North Carolina during the bitter-sweet final months of Obama’s presidency and then spent three years dealing with Trump, his worshippers and all that he unleashed on society. With what we saw and heard, we decided to return to Europe–but not England–as they had their own buffoon for Prime Minister. Happily, in neither England nor France has anyone accused me of poisoning the blood of my adoptive country. But sadly, whilst we were living in the US, there were those who questioned our right to be there. I had lost my regional accent years ago, so for many Trumpists we were simply foreigners and treated accordingly. Senator Burr’s secretary flat out told us to go back to England.

For the past 3.5 years we have lived in rural Normandy and can honestly say we have never been treated as “foreigners”. Newcomers, yes, but never have we been treated as threats to the French republic or its way of life. America, by comparison has become xenophobic. There’s a sad irony in this as it was the French who donated the Statue of Liberty to America. Just another historical fact unknown to most Trumpists. Truthfully, if anyone has the right to concern over the poisoning of America, it is the remnants of the native populations who have suffered grievously (and to this day) at the hands of white Europeans–many of whom actually were convicts. An uncomfortable truth is that the colony of Georgia was in fact a British penal colony!

So the great mystery is: How long will it take for the white supremacists of America to realise that it is they who have poisoned both the native peoples of America, as well as the slaves brought from Africa? The sad truth is, we humans tend to accuse others of the things that scare us most about ourselves. It is far too easy to blame others than to change ourselves.