Donald Trump rode into the White House on his high horse of protecting white America from the dreaded Other. He vowed to slay the dragons of otherness: Mexican rapists and drug dealers; black and brown lowlife losers from shithole countries; and, of course, his imaginary caravans of violent gang members invading our southern border.
As the curtain rises on Act Three of this Shakespearean-like tragedy, King Donald is encountering an abrupt plot reversal. After nearly four years of trying to remake America in his own white nationalist image, the King has come face-to-face with the real dreaded Other.
And it is us.
The world, it turns out, has taken a good, long look at America in this troubled summer of our discontent, and found it to be . . . well, a real shithole.
Trump was counting on his hosting of a summit of G7 world leaders in June as a symbol of what he branded as “transitioning back to greatness.” The conference, in his mind, would mean that those nasty little blips of a pandemic and demands for racial justice were yesterday’s fake news, and that he had moved on to greater missions, like leading on the world’s stage. German chancellor Angela Merkel, however, rained on Trump’s transitioning parade by calling the U.S. gathering a health risk in light of our country’s unbent coronavirus curve. Other G7 players agreed and the conference was called off.
It turns out that the G7 rebuff was a mere prelude, an appetizer if you will, in a nasty, karmic feast of crow laid upon Trump’s table for his dining pleasure. As of Wednesday, American travelers are prohibited from entering the European Union. This will go down in the annals of international diplomacy as an elegant act of the pot calling the kettle orange (orange, of course, being the new black).
Trump thinks he invented travel bans. He spent the first months of his presidency barring Muslims from entering the country. He’s still trying to build a wall to keep the Mexicans at bay. His only aggressive pandemic moves involved travel bans, first against China, then Europe.
To this president, the coronavirus was just another vile foreigner to be kept forever offshore. The disease, of course, was deeply into globalization. By the time Trump boarded up the country’s entry portals, the virus had already taken up residence in the homeland, quickly spreading to millions, and killing tens of thousands.
Europe now has a handle on the pandemic, unlike America where COVID runs rampant while Trump runs for cover. Based on the metrics of the past two weeks, E.U. countries as a bloc have slowed their new infections to 16 per 100,000 people. For the same period, the U.S. stands at 122 new cases per 100,000 people, a ratio that that grows exponentially by the day. Who can blame them from treating us as the highly unmasked, infection-prone fools that we are?
Yet, this startling new phenomenon of the world seeing America as the ugly other, is by no means limited to the coronavirus. We have been steadily losing value, prestige and power as a country since Donald Trump took office. He has belittled NATO and military alliances in Asia. He pulled us out of the Paris Climate Accord and tore up the Iran nuclear deal. He took the U.S. out of the World Health Organization in the middle of the worst pandemic in 100 years. He has insulted virtually every foreign leader who’s not a ruthless dictator.
But it has gotten so much worse in the past few weeks. Just as heads the world over were shaking at Trump’s utter failure to lead on virus mitigation, a Minneapolis police officer pressed his white knee into George Floyd’s black neck for nearly nine minutes, killing him and setting off a series of Black Lives Matter protests throughout the world. Nothing has been the same since.
Trump threatened to call out the military and have protesters shot. He had mostly peaceful protesters in front of the White House tear gassed and sprayed with rubber bullets so the president could walk to a nearby church for a photo op. He retweeted a video of a man shouting “white power” slogans. In another tweet, he sent images of black-on-white assaults and asked why white people weren’t protesting.
And the international community, our longtime allies, responded with a stunning sense of shock, bordering on disbelief. The Guardian reported that Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau, paused for 21 seconds after being asked to comment on his country’s southern neighbor. The silence was broken with these words: “We all watch in horror and consternation at what is going on in the United States. It is time to pull people together.”
E.U. leaders called out the Trump administration’s “abuse of power” and racism. The Spanish prime minister expressed solidarity with the demonstrators and concern for America’s growing authoritarianism. Another European official told a reporter that recent U.S. developments have left most political figures on his continent “shocked, appalled, and scared. . . they are locked in a Trump-induced coma.”
The world has long been fascinated with America. George Floyd’s death triggered massive protests all over the globe in large part because of that fascination, that connection people of all countries have with the U.S. Here’s what former Swedish prime minister Carl Bildt told The Atlantic: “Normally, when something happens – a war, an earthquake – everybody waits to see what the Americans are doing . . . and they calibrate their own response based on that.”
That protocol is no longer operative. No country in its right mind is copying us today. As New York Times opinion columnist Thomas Friedman wrote the other day, “We’re not leading. We’re not following. We’re lost.”
Sure, we still have the expertise, the world’s best universities and the most innovative companies. Our country has produced more Nobel prize winners, and has more organizations devoted to social justice than any other. But those riches, that helped mold what is best about America, lie dormant now because we have a president who rejects both science and justice.
Donald Trump is the personification of Green Day’s American Idiot, a cartoon character who sputters aphorisms about America First and a return to greatness. He is a deeply broken man who has turned our country into the dreaded and diabolical Other.