Don’t Be Distracted by Trump’s Noisy Nationalism

We may or may not agree with the conclusion by The Atlantic writer about #TakeAKnee, but we should note the summary of this week’s current issues and be inspired to continue our resistance and work to win in 2018:

Trump had another of his bad weeks last week. His secretary of health and human services was exposed for chartering expensive private jets at public expense. His Environmental Protection Agency director is charging the Treasury for a security detail big enough to impress Turkish Prime Minister Recep Erdogan. One more attempt to repeal Obamacare disintegrated in the Senate. A star basketball player publicly refused an invitation to the White House. The FBI obtained a Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act warrant for Trump’s onetime campaign chair, Paul Manafort, while the campaign was still underway, CNN reported last week.

Trump, the least popular first-year president in the history of polling, is always scouting for opportunities to depict his opponents—in every other way this country’s dominant mainstream—as somehow un-American. [As his troubles grow] Trump is adding extra force to his goading. He’s hoping to provoke a dynamic in which many of the country’s most famous and most visible African Americans appear en masse to disrespect the anthem and the flag. In so doing, they will fortify Trump’s own claim that these symbols properly belong to him and to his supporters.

The background fact to all Trump’s noisy nationalism is that this administration is more shot through with disloyalty, subversion, and hostile foreign influence than any administration in recent history. [Emphasis added.] The president’s son at a minimum welcomed the prospect of cooperation with Russian spies in the 2016 election—and possibly did much worse than that. The president’s personal finances appear to have been rescued in the crisis of 2008 by an infusion of funds from Russian sources. The president’s campaign chair and his first national-security adviser both took pay from Kremlin-linked sources in amounts still not yet fully disclosed.

As yet, there has been no showing of any illegality. But what is known suffices to wipe away any Trump claim to uphold the flag and the republic against others.

Read David Frum’s full opinion piece here.

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