Who really torched America - Trump or the rioters?
Trump’s self-celebration needed no such scorched earth, since he had already carpeted his empire with golden houses.
By AMOTZ ASA-ELUS PRESIDENT Donald Trump walks past a building defaced with graffiti by protesters in Lafayette Park. June 1, 2020. (photo credit: REUTERS//TOM BRENNER)
The intifada is back. Rubber bullets, tear gas, Molotov cocktails, broken glass, wholesale arrests, citywide curfews, pillars of smoke, and wellsprings of tears are all about us. Only this time, rather than unfold in the proverbial Land of Milk and Honey, all this is raging in the real one: America.And since our task is to write history’s first draft, it is our duty to answer the first question that future historians, after they will map the violence, assess the damage, and trail the fires that spread from the Midwest to the Atlantic and Pacific coasts, will ask: who torched America?As with many other mega-events involving a central actor, the scholars will split into two major schools: those who will say Trump torched America, and those who will say he did not. This column sides with the latter.DONALD TRUMP looted no store, pulled no trigger, struck no match, and pressed his knee against no one’s neck. How could he? Ensconced in the White House – initially above ground, eventually in its underground bunker – he has an ironclad alibi supported by a battery of advisers and secret service agents, whose testimonies are unambiguous: “The president,” they say, “was with us,” thus compelling history to rule: he wasn’t there.Trump wasn’t there when George Floyd was floored, cuffed, and choked, and he wasn’t there when protests outside policeman Derek Chauvin’s house spread to 400 American towns while police clubbed, shoved and pepper-sprayed demonstrators, passersby, and journalists, too.Trump was also clearly not there when a Minnesota state patrol arrested CNN reporter Omar Jimenez along with his crew while he was broadcasting from the midst of the inferno that Trump did not spark.Not only can Trump convincingly show where he was while all this happened elsewhere, he can also show what he was doing – spewing tweets that are all dated and timed – and make it plain that while others were rampaging, torching and shooting, he was silently typing his unique poetry, which in this case included lines like “Get tough Democrat mayors and governors” and the even more succinct “LAW & ORDER.”Indeed, blaming this conflagration on Trump is like blaming the Great Fire of Rome on Nero.NERO WAS rumored to have started with his own hands the inferno that devoured 10 of Rome’s 14 districts, and also to have climbed a rooftop from which he admired the flames’ view while playing a harp. In fact, the fire started in the city’s shops while the emperor was some 50 km. away.Trump actually was in his capital when mayhem erupted, but even so, his blamelessness is even clearer than Nero’s.
Rumors about Nero’s plot were fed by his developmental response to the fire, which was to build on its ashes an elaborate palace he called the Golden House, a project that made people assume the fire was designed to clear the vast real estate it required.Trump’s self-celebration needed no such scorched earth, since he had already carpeted his empire with golden houses, phallic towers, and sprawling golf clubs well before it caught fire.Also, Nero used the fire to scapegoat Rome’s Christians as its plotters. Trump did the exact opposite of that, emerging at a church’s boarded facade in order to publicly salute Christianity and hail its holy book.Then again, there are similarities between the Roman and American emperors – for instance, the narcissistic need to be at center stage, an urge that made Nero try to act in a theater, about as successfully as Trump has been trying to play national leader.And yes, like Nero, who habitually executed real and imagined plotters, Trump has routinely shed key aides, from secretary of state Rex Tillerson, secretary of defense James Mattis and national security advisers Michael Flynn and Herbert McMaster to White House chiefs of staff John Kelly and Reince Priebus, communications director Anthony Scaramucci, health secretary Tom Price, and the list goes on.And yes, with Trump blaming American governors and unleashing the military on the people, while Gen. Martin Dempsey, the former chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, cries out that “America is not a battleground” and “our fellow citizens are not the enemy”; and with Mattis diagnosing “we are witnessing the consequences of three years without mature leadership” – Nero’s last days do come to mind, because then, too, before even his bodyguards turned on him, “no provincial governor or army general felt safe” (Michael Grant, The Twelve Caesars, 1975, p. 150).But still, to say that Trump torched America? Not only does he have an alibi, the fire’s real culprits were in this case caught red-handed.Everyone saw who torched America; everyone saw the arsonists were the people Trump had humiliated, libeled, cornered, and scorned; the people who were unsettled by his degradations of women; by his claim that a white supremacist mob included “good people”; by his dubbing illegal immigrants as “animals” and “rapists”; by his libel that Haitian immigrants “all have AIDS”; by his assertion that “laziness is a trait in blacks”; by his quip that Nigerian immigrants will never “go back to their huts”; by his picking a fight with a fallen Muslim soldier’s grieving parents; and by his draft dodger’s disparagement of war hero John McCain’s captivity.These, then, were the people who torched America, whether as the demonstrator who could no longer stomach the social insult and political despair the president had kindled, or as the looter who effectively said: if my leader can be bad every day of his good life, why can’t I be bad this one day of my bad life?So no, Donald Trump didn’t torch the American republic. He just torched the American people.www.MiddleIsrael.netThe writer’s best-selling Mitz’ad Ha’ivelet Hayehudi (The Jewish March of Folly, Yediot Sfarim, 2019) is a revisionist history of the Jewish people’s leadership from antiquity to modernity.
