[OP-ED]: Fascism can't prevail
Hey, give the man credit. Donald Trump is the first President-elect –no, the first person in the world—to conduct foreign policy by twitter.
It was by twitter that he let a, well, increasingly terrified world, know about his telephone conversation last week with the president of Taiwan. And it was also by twitter that he complained about China’s economic and military policy, provoking what could become a huge diplomatic crisis.
Hey, give the man credit. Donald Trump is the first President-elect –no, the first person in the world—to conduct foreign policy by twitter.
It was by twitter that he let a, well, increasingly terrified world, know about his telephone conversation last week with the president of Taiwan. And it was also by twitter that he complained about China’s economic and military policy, provoking what could become a huge diplomatic crisis.
If the man who invented twitter diplomacy can raise hell in the world even before taking office, imagine if you dare the kind of havoc he could wreak the next four years.
Yet, if you think that picking a fight with China, the most populated country in the world, in 140 characters at a time is either crazy or stupid, I advise you to think again. After all Trump was the most improbable presidential candidate in history but, against every prediction, in a few weeks he will be the one occupying the White House. And he has twitter –and his savvy use of it–to thank for a good part of his victory.
Meanwhile I have a message to all those who laughed at Trump’s campaign shenanigans and thought –or wished– the buffoonish mogul did not have an ideological agenda: Think again. The man is capable of confounding everybody –Republicans and Democrats– who never expected him to follow through with most of his campaign promises. Yet, just by looking at his cabinet choices, it becomes clear that’s exactly what he set out to do.
Even if he hasn’t picked a Secretary of State yet among a scary group of candidates that includes a deranged Rudy Giuliani, the worst U.N. Ambassador ever John Bolton, and chameleon-like Mitt Romney among others, the China-Taiwan brouhaha would not have been a surprise if Trump’s campaign promise of taking a tougher position on China had been taken seriously.
The fact is that his cabinet choices could have been picked by the ultraconservative Heritage Foundation. Practically all of them have a long history of militantly going against President Obama’s programs on immigration, wages, the environment etc.
Let’s just look at what is in store for immigrants. From Mike Pence reaffirming that the border wall will be built and Mexico will pay for it, to the choice of rabid anti-immigration Alabama senator, the racist Jeff Sessions as Attorney General, to the possibility of having disgraced former Arizona sheriff and immigrant-hater Joe Arpaio, or Kris Kobach, Kansas secretary of state and a Trump adviser on immigration, who was the creator of Romney’s self-deportation plan in 2012 named as head of Homeland Security, without forgetting Stephen K. Bannon, the racist ideologue who is nothing less than Trump’s chief strategist, the picture is one of a police state in which immigrants will be treated as criminals, persecuted and victimized. For them, already experiencing a sharp increase in hate-motivated attacks, the future cannot be any bleaker.
And that’s why immigrants, community groups, churches and every decent person in the country must mobilize, organize and resist the coming administration’s extreme agenda and indiscriminate abuses.
Donald Trump’s fascist agenda cannot be allowed to prevail.
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