§ 2/2/2018–­♣ Racism takes shape where power and bigotry meet. So it follows then that ethnic cleansing works the same pattern. It’s precisely that spot on which power and bigotry meet and it’s precisely since that’s the place where racism emerges, that all political processes beginning there are doomed to fail and the process of immigration reform, however well planned, is itself doomed to lapse into a state of ethnic cleansing.

Like any political process, immigration reform takes the personal character and sway of its progenitor and lately that’s the one and only Donald J. Trump. In consequence, Trump is that precise spot where power and bigotry meet and that precise spot where racism rears its head and given Trump’s vile personal character, that precise spot where American ethnic cleansing finally comes to us in spades, where appallingly ethnic cleansing Trump style comes about.

Donald Trump sits in the Oval Office. The President wields tremendous power at home and around the world. Sadly, he’s proven himself a thick-skinned bigot. His menacing bias can’t help but taint the president’s influence, poisoning all he does and yes, all he purports to do. There are many across the globe who tend to take a cue or plan a path scorched now by our Head-of-State’s unveiled bigotry.

Trump’s a man who pitched in front of the whole world that by and large Mexican immigrants constitute rapists and drug dealers, ceding that only some of the race are truly good people.

Trump’s a man who failed to denounce the head of a white nationalist group who led an obvious white supremacist rally near the White House, who co-opted the president’s casual stance toward racism, who heralded his intolerance of minorities including his aversion to some immigrants in a speech he commenced with the words “Hail Trump,” just oozing anti-Semitism, drooling racist sentiment and even soliciting “peaceful ethnic cleansing ” all of it met with loud cheers and a host of fervent Nazi salutes from his rabid following.

Trump’s a man who saw another white supremacist rally, this one staged in the city of Charlottesville, Virginia, one precipitating the racist-fueled killing of a woman when a rally member plowed his car straight into a counter-protest group, peaceable people from the ranks of whom nineteen others were hospitalized and still our president told the world “there were good people on either side.”

Trump’s a man who once announced a particular judge could not preside impartially over a court case that involved the president simply because the said judge proved to be of Mexican descent.

Trump’s a man who independently busted a move to ban all Muslims from admittance to the United States, a man who’s committed countless other obvious acts of racism and acquiesced to many more beyond his immediate orbit.

Trump’s a man who’s an arbiter of world-class proportions who, showing disgust at a bipartisan immigration reform meeting, labelled Haiti and fifty-four African nations “sh__hole countries.” Bigotry plagues much of the rank and file but there it’s proven a rather cloaked and insidious racism involving few in seats of power.  Spread from perches of power of course, racism is prone to exert far more influence over populations.

When the president said “sh__hole countries,” Trump apologists cropped up all across the breadth of the USA. A select group of Republicans utterly rushed to Trump’s defense claiming the president used the colloquialism sh__house,  not sh__hole, like to parse the former term is a somehow less racist slur than the latter or certain nouns fare better than others in league with the word sh__. Sheese, Crikey, Gadzooks! Only in Trump’s White House!

Trump’s a man who in trying to seal the US-Mexican border, coldly initiated, justified and presided over separation of innocent immigrant children from their parents, some with very little chance of ever being reunited. He saw those children locked in cages, many sick and unwashed, without adequate medical care and hygiene provisions. It’s obvious this loathsome tack was basically inhuman, wholly averse to the great American ethic of human rights and social justice begrudged immigrants simply because they weren’t American citizens.

Donald Trump’s official power only serves to elevate his bigotry to the dire level of racism. In the same aspect, Trump’s power as President of the United States only serves to catapult that selfsame racism beyond the pale to the problematic realm of the extreme, to the highest attainable bar, to the top, to the absolute pinnacle of racism and Donald Trump himself to a spot as America’s premier racist.  What could auger any worse for governance of a free and enlightened society than a commander-in chief who’s racist-in-chief as well?

The latest immigration reform began with Donald Trump and hence mimes the dubious character and sway of Donald Trump. Since Trump’s a bigot who wields the nation’s highest power, his brand of immigration reform is way out of bounds. It’s a gross perversion of immigration reform as a matter of fact. It’s racism incarnate that approaches ethnic cleansing.

With a bigot like Trump in the lead, the phrase immigration reform becomes nothing less than code for ethnic cleansing, that widespread atrocity that’s tantamount to genocide, that grim, inevitable consequence of uttermost racism.

–♦©M. D. Phillips–awincingglare.com