Wednesday, July 31, 2019

What It Is

"I'm unfollowing the President of the United States today on Twitter, because his feed is the most hate-filled, racist, and demeaning of the 200+ I follow, and it regularly ruins my day to read it. So I'm just going to stop."
This was the way Democratic Senator Chris Murphy from Connecticut announced his departure from the Twitstorm that is the "real" Donald Trump. This particular weekend was a particularly onerous one for followers of "The President." This was the weekend during which the Twit-in-Chief chose to go after Congressman Elijah Cummings, calling the Representative from Maryland a "brutal bully." He also referred to Cummings' district, in and around Baltimore,  "a disgusting, rat and rodent infested mess." Leaving aside for the moment that rats are rodents and "infested" seems to be a creepily favorite way for "The President" to describe his pointed displeasure, I found myself wondering how I continue to stray into those murky waters knows as Trump Feed.
For weeks now, the current President of the United States has been picking fights with lawmakers on the Democratic side, most notably his on-going feud with the four first-year Representatives known as "The Squad." Women of color. Elijah Cummings, African-American. 
And some choose to see the twitterage coming from the Oval Office as racist. 
I do.
Not that the "real" Donald Trump is incapable of lobbing his sneers, jeers and epithets at men and women of all shades, stripes, and gender. He went after Nancy Pelosi for a bit, just to keep things misogynistic. And he popped off about wanting to designate Antifa as a terrorist group. One might argue that he is a hater, plain and simple. 
I wouldn't.
Or rather, I believe that's true as well. But I do believe that the current President of the United States is a racist, and reading his Twitter feed incites in me the same kind of reaction that I get when I stumble across the trolls foaming at their white supremacist mouths. Should I just ignore the vile screed that comes tumbling out into social media on a daily basis? 
Or should we just call it what it is? 
Racist. 

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