WHAT a pity that the Times is pay walled, so that Melanie Phillips’s comments on its pages are not available for all to read. Not least her latest article on the uproar in the oh-so-predictable liberal left media over President Trump’s partially reported ‘racist’ tweets, that had Boris Johnson and Jeremy Hunt competing in their virtue-signalling condemnations.
So I will take the liberty of extracting the keys points of her article.
While acknowledging that ‘by any normal standards this was dismaying behaviour by a president’ and that he was also factually wrong, she goes on to point out what the legions of London’s metropolitan leftie liberal elite fail to grasp, which is the fact that ‘this is not a normal president’, but one who ‘uses offensive language to speak in a kind of code to his supporters, and to set a trap for his foes who fail to understand the code and promptly fall into the snare’.
And this, as she goes on to write, is precisely what has happened.
Nancy Pelosi, recently in a feud with ‘the squad’ of Democrat congresswomen on the receiving end of the President’s ire (which you can read about here and here) and who Trump went on to defend, foolishly asserted that Trump’s tweet showed he’d always planned on ‘making America white again’.
No he hadn’t, as Melanie pointed out, ‘nor had he been making a point in his tweet about race or colour’. What his critics had omitted to note was that, after telling these congresswomen to go and sort out their presumed countries of origin, he’d said: ‘Then come back and tell us how to do it.’
What he went on to tweet was a direct challenge to these Democrat Congresswomen for calling Pelosi a racist (they had) as well to many other ’terrible things they say about the United States’, whose bigotry we first challenged in TCW first in March here and whose anti- Americanism we detailed in May here.
As Melanie writes, racial identity politics is consuming its own. The Democrat Party is at war with itself and this is ‘the pot’, in Melanie’s words, that Trump is so deftly stirring.
‘Every time he is called racist, his poll numbers climb among the millions who decode such attacks on him as un-American treachery by those who want to destroy border controls and thus the very concept of citizenship. The insult is also being used so indiscriminately it has all but lost its meaning as a description of truly evil intent. Trump is a man who plays the political game by completely different rules. Those who refuse to understand this will lose not just the people’s vote but the moral high ground, too.’
