DONALD TRUMP'S KKK IS HERE

DONALD TRUMP’S KKK IS HERE

©Wendell Griffen, 2020

On Monday, June 1, 2020, U.S. Attorney General William Barr orchestrated a violent attack by federal law enforcement agents against peaceful protesters who were lawfully assembled in Lafayette Park across from the White House.  The world watched as unarmed men, women, and children – all civilians – were attacked with agents armed with batons, firearms, and chemical agents.  The attack happened minutes after Trump delivered a belligerent address from the Rose Garden during which he declared himself “your president of law and order.”  Earlier that day, Trump declared during a conference call with US mayors and governors that he would use active duty military personnel and urged governors to call out the National Guard to “dominate” people engaged in peaceful protests throughout the United States against abusive and homicidal law enforcement behavior against people of color after George Floyd, an unarmed black man, was murdered by four Minneapolis, Minnesota police officers on May 25. 

After Barr’s assault on the Lafayette Park protesters happened, Trump, Barr, US Defense Secretary Mark T. Esper, Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff General Mark A. Milley (dressed in combat fatigues), Barr, Trump’s daughter Ivanka Trump, her husband Jarod Kushner, and White House personnel walked past where the protesters had been peacefully protesting to the front of St. John’s Episcopal Church where Trump posed for a photograph while holding a Bible upside down aloft in his right hand and posed for photographs with Barr, Esper, Ivanka Trump, and others. 

On Tuesday, June 2, 2020, Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell blocked a resolution that would have condemned what happened.  Soldiers dressed in battle fatigues were photographed on the front of the Lincoln Memorial.  On Wednesday (June 3), persons dressed as soldiers but whose uniforms lacked name tags, rank insignia, and unit designation were photographed in the nation’s capital.  By nightfall, it was discovered that they were riot teams from the Federal Bureau of Prisons, a law enforcement agency in the Justice Department that oversees incarcerated persons. 

Donald Trump wants to turn the United States into the Ku Klux Klan. He was endorsed by white supremacists David Duke and Thom Robb and the KKK in 2016, and white religious nationalists and evangelicals overwhelmingly voted for him that year.  His latest stunts follow a long personal and commercial history of racist, misogynist, and xenophobic bigotry.  And they are intended to foment and stoke fear among white supremacists by using peaceful protests against abusive and homicidal law enforcement behavior following the May 25 murder of George Floyd as a pretext for authoritarianism and state-sanctioned violence in order to “dominate,” intimidate, and suppress lawful dissent, including voting in the 2020 presidential election. 

All this is designed to arouse white religious nationalists, supremacists, free market fundamentalists, and neo-fascists to mimic Trump’s violent and vicious behaviors and beliefs.  Trump is a charlatan.  He has never shown sincere interest in or acceptance of any religious system, let alone the non-violent, anti-materialistic, and inclusive religion of Jesus. 

However, like Adolf Hitler, Trump will tell any lie, profane anything that is sacred, and violate any norm and principle to advance his self-aggrandizement and narcissistic aims.  William Barr, Mitch McConnell, U.S. Senators Tom Cotton (Arkansas), Ted Cruz (Texas), Lindsey Graham (South Carolina), other Senate enablers, and White House advisers Stephen Miller, Kellyanne Conway, and Jared Kushner make up the political leadership of Trump’s White House-based white nationalist cabal. 

Watch for Albert Mohler, Richard Land, Jack Graham, and Robert Jeffress of the Southern Baptist Convention, James Dobson (head of Focus on the Family), Jerry Falwell, Jr. (President of Liberty University), Franklin Graham (evangelical preacher and son of Billy Graham), Mike Huckabee (former Arkansas Governor and father of former White House Press Secretary Sarah Huckabee), and other white religious nationalists to exhort white so-called “evangelical Christian conservatives” to join Trump’s neo-fascist crusade to “Make America Great Again.”  Meanwhile, Trump will engage in more racist, xenophobic, and misogynist demagoguery to distract white voters from blaming him for making the US the sickest nation in the world from the deadly coronavirus pandemic. 

Donald Trump is a sociopath, charlatan, and political, commercial, and moral fraud, not a prophet.  People who love God, freedom, justice, peace, and truth reject his crusade to sacralize white supremacy, authoritarianism, and religious bigotry and his plan to turn the United States into a 21^st Century version of Hitler’s Germany and Nathan Bedford Forrest’s Ku Klux Klan. 

Wendell Griffen is pastor of New Millennium Church, a state court trial judge, a U.S. Army veteran, and a social justice activist in Little Rock, Arkansas whose personal blogs are Justice Is a Verb and The Fierce Urgency of Prophetic Hope.