Arpaio, the sadist, pardoned by Trump on August 25.
The Dreamers thrown into the sea by Trump on September 5.
The actions are bookends.
Between them they hold the volumes on malice, political expedience, lies and racist pandering that comprise the death-cult faction of the Republican Party, 88% of whom still support this President, the authentic culmination of decades of Republican race baiting, the true and abiding wizard of all that white fear and resentment.
The imagination of Trump and his supporters can conjure only one stunted fantasy: eternal battalions of carefully chosen white people in all their Puritan innocence and cowboy bravado will go on and on, forever making America great again until that final cracking open of the skies and the return of white Jesus, arrayed in white, helmed by vivid white arc-angels, come to carry all the white elect home to white Heaven, where only the clean-up crew are all those shades darker.
Shakespeare, of course, knew how to answer the corruption of Trump’s twin actions:
“Grant them removed, and grant that this your noise
Hath chid down all the majesty of England;
Imagine that you see the wretched strangers,
Their babies at their backs and their poor luggage,
Plodding to th’ ports and coasts for transportation,
And that you sit as kings in your desires,
Authority quite silent by your brawl,
And you in ruff of your opinions clothed;
What had you got? I’ll tell you: you had taught
How insolence and strong hand should prevail,
How order should be quelled; and by this pattern
Not one of you should live an aged man,
For other ruffians, as their fancies wrought,
With self same hand, self reasons, and self right,
Would shark on you, and men like ravenous fishes
Would feed on one another.”*
Trump has unchained a deeper cruelty in this American polis. It will ravage all before it — the innocent and women and children.
And these fools think that such a beast can be managed, that it will only sunder and eat those as instructed.
Seven months in and we have only seen the beginning of the carnage.
*Sir Thomas More Act 2, scene 4
