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Editorial Trump's excuses won't reduce the threat his rhetoric poses to people's safety in and out of the United States

IT takes an astonishing level of audacity to caution opposition politicians and media on the need to respect the truth and show civility to rivals, but that’s Donald Trump.

“The safety of the American people is my highest and absolute priority. We have to unify,” he said, after explosive devices were posted to a number of prominent individuals.

Yet no politician in recent years has shown such scant regard for truth or done more to divide people, both in the US and internationally.

His carefully scripted comments, warning against careless comparisons of political opponents to historic villains and blaming the media for cheapening public debate, are intended to convey an image of the president as victim.

No-one can state definitively which individual or group was behind the mail bombs, but Trump failed to mention that all addressees, from Hillary Clinton and Maxine Waters to George Soros, and taking in the CNN TV channel, have at one time or another been attacked by him.

The sender’s name — albeit misspelt — was registered as Debbie Wasserman Schultz, who had to stand down under a cloud from the Democratic National Committee chair after allegations of favouritism towards Clinton during the campaign against Bernie Sanders for nomination as the party’s presidential candidate.

The easy-to-reach verdict is that these potentially lethal weapons emanated from Trump supporters against his opponents.

Equally plausible is that this was an elaborate plot by the president’s enemies to undermine Republican Party candidates in the approaching midterm elections and weaken his position in Congress before the 2020 presidential poll.

When it comes to dirty tricks by rich and powerful sinister forces in US politics, anything is possible.

Trump came to power by claiming to speak for those abandoned by Wall Street presidents, as their jobs were transferred overseas through free trade agreements or their pay was undermined by so-called illegal immigration.

It rang a bell with many working people fed up with their living standards plummeting while the rich, including Trump, grow richer and dodge tax on an industrial scale.

The US president’s decisions to bail out of trade deals, demanding they be rewritten, are lauded by his propaganda machine as defending the rights of US workers, but their real motivation is enhancing market share and profitability of US transnational corporations.

Trump’s capacity for saying one thing and then contradicting it, depending on his audience, is excused by supporters as “fake news” by the mainstream media.

But, when he pitches into Cuba, Venezuela, Iran, Russia or China, the MSM comes along for the ride, as with the nonsensical assertion by Vice-President Mike Pence that Venezuela’s President Nicolas Maduro is responsible for financing the people marching through Mexico to try to cross the US border.

Pence credits information from Honduran President Juan Orlando Hernandez for telling the Washington Post in Tuesday’s edition that 7,000 marchers, organised by “leftist groups,” had been “financed by Venezuela.”

Trump tweeted that “criminals and unknown Middle Easterners are mixed in” the crowd, although he admitted later he had no information to back this up.

Hernandez knows that the White House and the mainstream media are quite happy to regurgitate his accusation, rather than accept that long-term US imperialist exploitation lies behind the poverty and suffering throughout Latin America.

Trump’s Republicans and Clinton’s Democrats are divided more by personal ambition than political differences.

Pretending that these are substantial by engaging in personalised abuse and then calling for civilised debate to cool the public temperature are nothing more than electoral ploys.

 

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