Just about everything about the Trump administration fills me with a sense of despair. He seems to have no concept or care for the rule of law. I thought it was deeply troubling when he made a speech to police officers encouraging them to to break the law and rough up suspects. Jeff Sessions’s abuse of his position as Attorney General to indicate that gay people have no protection against discrimination is scandalous. And just as I thought things couldn’t get much worse, Trump announced his plan to sack eleven thousand transgender patriots from the armed services. But surely we had hit rock bottom with his defence of Nazis and White Supremacists in Charlottesville because they had a permit, whereas the other protester’s didn’t? Not quite. If you really want to understand, if you haven’t already, the moral and social depravity of this man, look no further than the Pardon yesterday of Sheriff Joe Arpaio of Maricopa County in Arizona.
The Sheriff looks and sounds like a character out of that ground breaking 1960s film about racial discrimination, In the Heat of the Night. He was proud of his twenty five year record of law and order, or as Trump crowed, “keeping people safe”. The trouble is that the this good ‘ol boy didn’t trouble too much for the law and seemed to think he was above it. Or rather he was the law. He took great pride in how tough it was in his county jail. The inmates were made to wear pink underwear and the food served was inedible. And that’s just the humane side of it. Murder gangs ruled the roost. Anyone accused of crimes against women and children are given a KOS designation. Kill On Sight. And they were. While the ‘guards’ place bets. But it was his policy towards the Latino community that quite rightly brought him before the courts and found him in criminal contempt. Old Joe would round up anyone who he thought fitted the racial profile of a Latino and assume they were illegals. Well, he certainly took back control of Maricopa County. Now the poor fellow is trying to crowd fund his legal costs. Depressingly, he won’t find that too difficult.
The real question is what if anything the Republicans are going to do about Trump. They always had an uneasy relationship with Tea Party fundamentalism, but now things are different. Both Houses come up for election in 6 November 2018. The Democrats need 24 seats to win back the House and 3 seats to win back the Senate. And Trump’s polling is at a record low. The GOP are becoming very twitchy indeed. But don’t worry. A Trump supporter sidled over to me the other day and with a wink and a leer he uttered these cheering words, “we’ll keep control of both Houses because we’ve Gerrymandered the seats.”
That pretty well sums up the moral depravity of this once great party. Is anyone actually going to do anything?
