Tuesday, November 28, 2017
Trump & the Navajo code talkers
Yesterday I had a post at my own blog about an article in The Atlantic that opined that the reason people voted for Trump and still support him was/is *not* because of financial worries but because they and he are racists. Here's a bit from the article ...
[...] Clinton defeated Trump handily among Americans making less than $50,000 a year. Among voters making more than that, the two candidates ran roughly even. The electorate, however, skews wealthier than the general population. Voters making less than $50,000, whom Clinton won by a proportion of 53 to 41, accounted for only 36 percent of the votes cast, while those making more than $50,000—whom Trump won by a single point—made up 64 percent. The most economically vulnerable Americans voted for Clinton overwhelmingly; the usual presumption is exactly the opposite.
If you look at white voters alone, a different picture emerges. Trump defeated Clinton among white voters in every income category, winning by a margin of 57 to 34 among whites making less than $30,000; 56 to 37 among those making less than $50,000; 61 to 33 for those making $50,000 to $100,000; 56 to 39 among those making $100,000 to $200,000; 50 to 45 among those making $200,000 to $250,000; and 48 to 43 among those making more than $250,000. In other words, Trump won white voters at every level of class and income. He won workers, he won managers, he won owners, he won robber barons. This is not a working-class coalition; it is a nationalist one ...
And then yesterday Trump proved that article right when he met with Navajo code talkers ...
What is creepy is the lengths his toadies are going to to defend what he said.
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Is it just me, or did Trump achieve the absolute worst one can do with his tongue as a bludgeon? Insult heroes, insult a woman and employ racist undertones to do it? A trifecta. And he probably thinks the Navajos were there to honor him. That poor, sick loser. I really think he hit a deeper level in his wallow than he ever reached before.
ReplyDeleteHe was trying to diss Elizabeth Warren for supposedly lying about her Native American heritage. She actually didn't claim it for college scholarships or any other kind of gain. I think I understand what was going on because our family had a similar story (or maybe you'd call it "legend"). My mother heard it from her great-aunt, who said that her grandmother was half Indian. She didn't know what tribe, all she had was a name, Mary Martin. Which is a common name that would be impossible to find correlating documentation on. Not that there was any documentation in those days anyway. The woman in question had to have been born nearly 200 years ago. Mom would have been 1/32 Native, and I would be 1/64th. If it's true. An old photo of the great-aunt looked like she could have been part Native American. My brother said it's just a story the old people liked to tell. Sometimes the old people know more than we give them credit for. Anyway my point in this meandering story is that I'm not going to excoriate Elizabeth Warren for lying, because every family has those oral history things.
ReplyDeleteExactly, Katherine. My aunt married a guy from Kansas. Yeah, he said he had Indian blood and, of course, it's always Cherokee. I think these stories are de rigeur for midwesterners. All my grandparents came from Poland. I got the ancestry test and there were no surprises. 97% slavic, 2% Finnish, the rest trace amounts of Scandinavian and western Europe. I think I'm more Polish than people in Poland.
DeleteMy family is nuttier than both of yours. I am, it seems, the Eleventh Earl of Sandringham. The Tenth Earl was my father, the oldest son of my grandfather, who was acknowledged as the Ninth Earl by his teammates on the old (Evanston, Ill.) North Ends, a semi-pro team for which he played first base. In my youth I was never able to shake any of my aunts and uncles, all of whom pretended to believe it. I never did. But my oldest son said we ought to look into it. Fortunately, a cousin has been able to prove that Grandfather was not the first, nor even the second, son in his family. So the claim is impossible as well as ridiculous. But it had a good 60-year run.
DeleteIn my family, the story was that we were the descendants of Stonewall Jackson :)
DeleteIf it turns out that the first two sons predeceased your grandfather, wouldn't that mean you still have a shot, Tom. Or should I say, M'Lord.
DeleteAs for my ancestors, I'm sure they were all sodbusters. My last name means "dig", which seems to say it all.
My grandmother told people we were "related" to Henry VIII because we have Welsh Tudors in our ancestry. Never mind that there are about dozen last names in all of Wales that three million people have to share, and Tudor is one of the more common ones.
DeleteYes, he's achieved a new low.
ReplyDeleteAbout Warren, there was no legit reason to bring her up at the event = she wasn't there and it had nothing to do with her. He brought her up because the only way he has related to Native Americans since his candidacy has been through making fun of them with the Pocahontas meme.
There's a Think Progress article criticizing Warren for her claims. I think she should get a DNA test and if Cherokee ancestry is zero, she should issue the apology as drafted by the article writer. I think she is a big enough person to do this. It would defuse the right wing jerks. The article is at
Deletehttps://thinkprogress.org/elizabeth-warren-is-not-cherokee-c1ec6c91b696/
I honestly think that in his brain Trump thought he was complimenting his audience: "You're the real deal, not like Elizabeth Warren, whom we call Pocahontas to mock her fake claimed to Native American blood. Even though I am the only one who calls her that, and this comment has nothing to do with honoring you, just a random thought, really, you guys are great."
ReplyDeleteMakes me wonder what rich donors saw in Trump when they came out of private meetings and called him "charming."
I keep thinking of that line by Hunter Thompson in "Fear and Loathing": "Have we sunk to the level of dumb beasts?!"
As a (mostly) white person who did NOT vote for Trump, I refuse to feel shame despite the figures offered above.
I'm white too. I think the point of the article is not that all white people are racists ... white people also voted for Hillary ... but that white racists helped get Trump elected, not white people who were angry at being poor.
ReplyDeleteHow do you extrapolate that it was the racists, not the angry poor people, from the stats above? Just curious ...
DeleteAccording to the article, the poorest people voted for Hillary. And the group that put Trump over the top was that of white voters .... he won a majority of them from every economic level.
DeleteBut how do you make the leap that they're racists? I dunno, maybe it's just me, but throwing labels around like this strikes me as jumping to unsubstantiated conclusions.
DeleteI guess you'd have to read the Atlantic article, which is quite long and detailed, to see why the writer makes that case.
DeleteHis point is that what bound Trump voters together wasn't financial worries but a desire to go back to a time when white Christians were the real Americans, were on top, and "others" (racial minorities, religious minorities) could be kept in their subordinate place. He deemed them white nationalists, but I'd say they are also sexists and homophobes.
Trump gives us daily examples of his being the avatar of these people
I have to admit I thought that Elizabeth Warren had claimed to be of Native American ancestry; that she had exploited that claim for educational and/or academic career advancement; and that the claim of Native American ancestry was later debunked.
ReplyDeleteThis Snopes fact check seems to indicate that she didn't claim Native American ancestry on student or job applications; but that at least one former employer of hers (Penn's law school) leveraged the claim in order to demonstrate faculty diversity. What the article doesn't clarify is whether or not she really is of Native American ancestry.
https://www.snopes.com/politics/politicians/warren.asp
Whatever the truth of the claim of Native American ancestry, it's something that conservatives will never let go of. As for the moniker Pocahontas: I'm of the school that says, If it's offensive to a person to call them something, don't call them that. But I'm sure the taunt works because Pocahontas is in the popular consciousness thanks to the Disney animated film from a couple of decades ago. I don't doubt Disney took some heat for that portrayal (I recall that one local reviewer at the time criticized the studio for portraying the Native American heroine as a "Baywatch babe"), just as it took some heat for its portrayal of Middle Easterners in "Aladdin". On the other hand, when my dad was a kid, Native Americans in films greeted people by raising a hand and grunting "How", and then were mowed down with rifle bullets by white people on horses. So maybe Baywatch isn't the desired mass media portrayal, but it's less bad than it used to be. Still, if a white person called a black candidate "Buckwheat", I don't see how that doesn't come out as racist, so "Pocahontas" wouldn't seem to pass muster, either.
I don't know if it's really possible to prove that someone is or is not of Native American ancestry if the ancestor in question was a long time ago, and there weren't any formal records kept. I know there are these DNA tests that people get that supposedly tell you all about your ancestors. But I am skeptical about them. My sister got results that said she was less than 4% Scandinavian. But we are 25% Danish and that side of the family is well documented, going back a couple of hundred years. The test also said something about how much Neanderthal was in one's background. They lost me at that point. I don't think there has been any intact, uncontaminated Neanderthal DNA recovered to compare it to, if indeed Neanderthals and Homo Sapiens interbred.
DeleteWhether Warren rightly or wrongly said she had Native American ancestors, that doesn't excuse Trump using the word 'Pocahontas' as a contemptuous nickname for her. It also doesn't excuse or explain bringing it up to the Navajo code talkers, who have nothing to do with Warren. That is racist and an attack on Native Americans.
ReplyDeleteYeah, you'll have to take Trump up with Trump.
ReplyDeleteWhat I find disturbing is that people still support him, knowing that he's a racist. 'Trump is just being Trump' isn't an acceptable excuse.
ReplyDeletejust to make sure we're aligned on this: I didn't write "Trump is just being Trump". You put that in single quotes as though you're repeating or characterizing something that someone else said. I am not that person. Right?
DeleteNo, not you :). It just seems to be what many of his supporters say when confronted with his bad behavior.
DeleteHe isn't only a racist. He is a nut. Theresa May had to call him on three of his morning retweets of fake news from a racist British Web site. NBC and CNN are both hunkered down as their foreign correspondents fear that his dictator peer group will go after them knowing POTUS will cheer them on. And someone in the White House is frantically wig-wagging that he believes Obama was born in Kenya, 3 million illegal voters denied him his majority and that fake news he retweets is the real deal.
ReplyDeleteThis is not a case for impeachment. It is time for the straitjacket. And his congressional enablers - I am talking to you, Paul Ryan -- will never get out of Purgatory for this.
"Never get out of Purgatory"? So, like, wouldn't that be Hell?
DeleteIf there is a hell and people do go there, guys like Ryan would seem to be good candidates. They are the real life examples of the "goats", with their tax plan that will screw the poor and sick as they suck up to rich donors, meanwhile supporting a psychotic jerk who will probably get us all nuked.
Delete"Never get out of purgatory" is sort of like needing public services when Paul Ryan is in charge of providing them.
Delete