Madcapping and Conning with Trump: Feeding Americans Addiction to Illusions
This editorial from the LA Sentinel by Dr. Maulana Karenga is the best synopsis of the leader of the free world I’ve seen yet:
The current and seemingly consensual wisdom is that this pandemic has exposed the fault lines of injustice and inequality in society. But it has also added in the problematic person of Trump another blow to the racist conception of Whiteness, its claims of superiority in leadership, salvational power, divine election and a perfect union. At the risk of seeming racially insensitive to White people, it would seem that if anyone wanted or needed living and life-long proof that White people aren’t superior and can be willfully ignorant, woefully incompetent and alarmingly unworthy of positions they hold and the praise they receive, then Trump offers abundant and unarguable evidence. But, let’s face it, whatever Trump is, America has made him. Indeed, it elected him to be its racial representative, a kind of great White hope, its corporate captain and collaborator, and the central symbol of its longed-for misconceived manhood regained and reasserted at the expense of all others at home and abroad.
Trump is America’s carnival barker and racial bully, hawking and holding high Americana sights and scenes under the re-pitched Big Top, whose central act is MAGA. And stripped of its mystification and manufactured fog, MAGA is little more than a mad and toxic mixture of racist nostalgia, meanness, pettiness and patriotism misperceived, packaged and promoted as justifiable hatred, hostility and phobia towards different others, especially the vulnerable. Therefore, the White House has morphed into the Mad House with Trump madcapping and conning his way through problems he can’t handle, silencing and sidelining scientists and experts when the country needs them most, and pretending knowledge and intelligence he does not have and can only wishfully witness and envy in others.
Read the full piece here at the LA Sentinel
