The current president of the United States isn’t a real American, Paul Krugman says
Remember Sarah Palin’s favorite campaign prop, Joe the Plumber? In 2008, they talked about real (read: white) America. And after Barack Obama won the 2008 election, many delusional Americans assumed Palin and her white supremacist ideas were defeated. Not so fast, cautions Paul Krugman in his Monday. In his first post-Charlottesville dispatch, Krugman us that Palin “was harshly condemned for those remarks, and rightly so — and not just because the real, real America is a multiracial, multicultural land of great metropolitan areas as well as small towns. More fundamentally, what makes America is that it is built around an idea: the idea that all men are created equal, and are entitled to basic human rights. Take away that idea and we’ re just a giant version of a two-bit autocracy.” Unfortunately, as this weekend’s events proved, we’ re much closer to said autocracy than we were nine years ago. Even worse, “Donald Trump’s refusal to condemn the murderous white supremacists in Charlottesville finally confirms what has become increasingly obvious: The current president of the United States isn’ t a real American.” Real Americans are devoted to the ideals of inclusion and diversity, not the “place or race your ancestors came from. And when we fall short in our effort to live up to our ideals, as we all too often do, at least we realize and acknowledge our failure.” Trump may have proved he isn’ t a real American this weekend, but we shouldn’ t be surprised. What did we expect from the man “who began his political ascent by falsely questioning Barack Obama’s place of birth.” This is a man who prefers not only the company of white supremacists, but of dictators — “people like Turkey’s Recep Tayyip Erdogan or Rodrigo Duterte, the homicidal leader of the Philippines. When Trump visited Saudi Arabia, his commerce secretary exulted in the absence of hostile demonstrations, an absence ensured by the repressiveness of the regime.”
