Trump wants alligator moats at the border because he’s a medieval tyrant

Sasha Abramsky

The U.S. President who has clearly lost his mind because of his immersion in crimes against humanity and treason against the nation which is about to bring his impeachment, shocked the civilized world by calling for proliferation of dangerous reptiles to scare away immigrants, if not fatally bite and devour them.

The following is a report in this regard by California-based British freelance journalist Sasha Abramsky, a part-time lecturer at the University of California at Davis, for the ‘Truthout’ site, titled: “Trump wants alligator moats at the border because he’s a medieval tyrant”.

In the mid-15th century, a brutal leader in Transylvania, in what is now Romania, earned notoriety for how he dispatched his enemies to a horrible death. Vlad III Dracula had a penchant for violence and bloodshed in the most sadistic manner that stood out for its creative cruelty, even by the brutal standards of his day. This passage is from Richard Pallady’s entry on Vlad in the Encyclopedia Britannica:

“His penchant for impaling his enemies on stakes in the ground and leaving them to die earned him the name Vlad the Impaler…. He inflicted this type of torture on foreign and domestic enemies alike: notably, as he retreated from a battle in 1462, he left a field filled with thousands of impaled victims as a deterrent to pursuing Ottoman forces.”

This chilling passage stands as testament to the murderous direction which a single immoral, bloodthirsty leader can bend the institutions of state once he has reached a pinnacle of power.

One hundred years later, in Russia, Czar Ivan IV vastly expanded his country’s territories through a reign of terror against perceived enemies, both domestic and foreign. He beat family members to death during his paranoid rages, blinded enemies, used the Oprichniki (his vast secret police force) to terrorize political opponents and seemed to thrive on ever more creative ways of inflicting torment on those who got on his bad side. History remembers him as Ivan the Terrible.

Such is the stuff of nightmares: medieval tyrants, drunk on power, believing that the throne and power are their right which nobody could take. Such people believe they are not bound by the moral codes that bind others. As rulers they seek, like Machiavelli’s “Prince”, to instill pure fear as the glue holding their governing structures in place, to banish morality from considerations of governance. They are willing to do whatever they deem necessary in order to cement their power in place, appease their followers and cow their opponents. Amoral to the core, they believe that their violent means are necessary to secure the ends they crave.

And now, more than half a millennium after Vlad the Impaler’s death, we read that a 21st century American president, who is on record as stating he believes he is a “chosen one,” wanted his border patrol agents to deliberately shoot would-be-migrants in the legs and his southern border wall to be lined with spikes designed to impale anyone who tried to climb over it, and got his advisers to work on cost estimates for building moats along the border filled with alligators and snakes to kill desperate immigrants trying to swim to the “land of the free.” And instead of instantly resigning and sounding the alarm about these draconian proposals, those advisers apparently started to seriously sound out how possible the building of such a monster-filled moat might be.

Let’s be blunt here: This isn’t about politics; it’s about a race-based, terroristic, totalitarian vision of the United States and of American identity. One doesn’t talk about shooting desperate, destitute migrants from poor countries to the south, if one in any way, shape or form values migrants’ lives, due process or the rule of law. One doesn’t fantasize about impaling immigrant children and feeding asylum seekers to alligators if one has an ounce of empathy, morality or human decency. This is the sort of fever-dream the Argentine Junta concocted when they got the bright idea of taking political opponents in airplanes and helicopters to drop them into the ocean.

In this fractured, hallucinogenic political landscape, old terms still float around uncomfortably in the ether, as commentators and public alike try to wrap their heads around the new world of which Trump (ironically the grandson of an illegal and immortal German immigrant to the U.S. is both a cause and consequence. Terms like “leader of the free world” still occasionally pop up in the discourse. But, hypocritical as those terms may have been in the past, think about how utterly fallacious, how entirely devoid of meaning they have become today as these reports pour out: The wildly egotistical self-styled “leader of the free world” is engaging in fantasies of violence that come straight out of medieval archives and mid-20th-century fascist playbooks.

Children in schools across the U.S are taught to sing a national anthem about a “land of the brave” and “home of the free,” and look to the Statue of Liberty as a national symbol. And yet, ensconced in the White House, a man entirely devoid of moral feeling stews about immigrants and plots evermore astoundingly violent means of deterring them from seeking refuge, safety and opportunity within the United States.

How dare he? How dare his enablers, his sycophants and his fellow bloodthirsty fantasists? How dare the GOP congressional leadership continue to defend this man while simultaneously claiming to be the party of family values and moral stewardship? How dare Trump’s cheerleaders in the conservative media claim that those who criticize this president are purveyors of fake news?

This isn’t only about politics or parties jockeying for pole position. This is about the survival of decency and moral agency in a period that the full bureaucratic might of the world’s most powerful country is under the control of a torture-fantasist; a period when a man with a killer’s cold-blooded temperament sits atop the U.S. political system.

Years from now, a whole bunch of people who supported Trump through thick and thin, I suspect, will try to distance themselves from the full moral catastrophe of moment by either denying that they ever supported Trump in the first place or saying something to the effect of “we didn’t know.”

Don’t anyone dare say at the end of this nightmare that they didn’t know! For the evidence is out there in plain sight, and history will judge Donald Trump, supporter of shooting down and impaling desperate migrant families, for the Dracula that he is.

Trump is the perverse personification of American exceptionalism

Sasha Abramsky

With an unprecedented hubris, the United States of America thinks that it is the exceptional country in the world and that it is the absolute role model for mankind and thus should be obeyed and followed in every aspect of human life.

This has become more evident with coming to office of Donald Trump as he is excessively overwhelmed with the illusion that he is the best US president and he can save America from its imminent fate of total extermination. Sasha Abramsky, a freelance journalist and a part-time lecturer at the University of California at Davis, has addressed the issue in his piece titled, "Trump is the perverse personification of American exceptionalism".

As with so many of Donald Trump’s interactions, in his dealings with other countries, the U.S. president is a bull in a china shop, smashing through everything in his path. It is, to say the least, discombobulating.

When the president of the United States doesn’t hesitate to wade into the domestic politics of allied nations, and goes into attack-dog mode against political figures in those countries, it sends a strong signal both that traditional alliances are breaking down, and also that in this new entertainment-as-politics era, anything goes and etiquette be damned. The U.K., the U.S.’s closest ally over the past century, has borne much of this stunning breach of protocol.

Trump has, in his verbal dealings with the U.K., repeatedly treated the country as a suzerainty, a fiefdom for which he assumes the right to “suggest” fundamental decisions, rather than as a sovereign state.

Even by the utterly debased truth-standards of Trumplandia, there is a peculiar absurdity to Donald Trump lecturing anybody on how to counter violent crime outbreaks. After all, this is a man who does not even consider gun control legislation in the wake of one mass shooting after another. Moreover, Trump frequently aligns himself with the most violent elements of society — from calling the neo-Nazis in Charlottesville “very fine people” to flirting with paramilitary violence.

This should lead us to question Trump’s bashing of international leaders all the more. When Trump says banal, cruel, inflammatory things about a U.S. political figure, as he so frequently does, one can, I suppose, just about make the argument that it’s all part of the rough-and-tumble of a fiercely partisan domestic politics. It’s still jaw-dropping how much venom one man can inject into the system, but at least it’s about chasing votes within the country of which Trump is leader.

However, when he does the same thing regarding other countries, we witness an extraordinary exercise in hubris: Assuming his role as a bull in a china shop, Trump butts heads with anyone and anything that he so chooses. He seems to think he has the right to do so because he is American, which means he is powerful — very powerful; and in Trump’s worldview, the powerful do not have to respect lesser mortals. Indeed, in his zero-sum understanding of human life and interactions, to respect others is to show a sign of unforgivable political and personal weakness: more respect going to others means less respect coming back to you.

Time and again, Trump has picked puerile fights with local and national leaders in allied countries. On the one hand, this is just bloviating; the tweets are the ugly rantings of a crotchety old man who uses the internet and his smartphone as extensions of his id.

He has said that “Paris is no longer Paris” in the shadow of terrorist attacks. He has critiqued German Chancellor Angela Merkel for her handling of the influx of refugees, mainly Syrian, in the 2015-16 period. He has called Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau dishonest and a liar; and, after the vituperative G7 summit in Canada last June, Trump’s then-economics adviser Larry Kudlow, presumably with the president’s blessing, accused Trudeau of stabbing the U.S. administration in the back. Trump has mocked the accent of the Indian prime minister, and accused the Japanese and the South Koreans of freeloading in their decades-long embrace of U.S. security guarantees.

Back in the U.K., Trump, a U.S. president with no sovereign authority over British politics, openly embraced the idea of a Boris Johnson premiership even before the hapless Prime Minister Theresa May announced her intention to step down. Johnson, a one-time mayor of London and then a foreign secretary, played a crucial role in the Brexit vote outcome by coming out strongly against EU membership during the referendum campaign. He has also achieved domestic notoriety over the years, as he has ratcheted up his nationalist rhetoric through talking about “piccaninnies” and making a slew of other racist comments. Many commentators compare Johnson’s rise in the U.K. to the real estate mogul’s in the U.S.

Trump has also argued that Nigel Farage, the extremist who helped set the conditions for the Brexit referendum victory, ought to be made the U.K.’s ambassador to the U.S. — an argument that was ridiculed when he made it, but which I’m sure will be resurrected if Johnson becomes prime minster in late July.

Like so many innately incurious and self-absorbed people, the 45th U.S. president thinks that he knows everything about everything, and that his most unfiltered of thoughts are thus worthy of broadcasting in their entirety. Read a few poorly written pieces of conservative commentary, and Trump is suddenly an expert on British crime rates. Read a few tweets on Brexit, and he knows the secret of how to untie the Gordian knot that the British political system has twisted itself into in attempting to implement an essentially impossible disengagement from Europe.

The real danger here is not that these comments betray Trump’s essential lack of wisdom and grace. There have, after all, been all-too-many boorish leaders dotted throughout human history. No, the deeper danger is that, seeking to sidestep the avalanche of inanity that now emanates from D.C. and heads in their direction, the U.S.’s global networks of allies simply start to tune the country out, essentially leaving a post-Trump United States as a heavily armed pariah — a nuclear behemoth with an otherwise shrunken global footprint. Last year, in response to Trump’s increasingly erratic behavior, German Chancellor Merkel said that Europe could no longer rely on the U.S. for protection and succor.

Trump’s re-election campaign slogan is Keep America Great, KAG — which, a cursory glance at the Urban Dictionary will show, probably isn’t exactly the best acronym to run for high office on. But dodgy definitions aside, there’s a vertigo-inducing historical short-sightedness to the idea. One doesn’t keep anything or anyone great by gratuitously throwing insults and threats left and right at any and all in your line of vision.