By Lafe Tolliver, Esq
Guest Column
The latest distraction concocted from the Trump Administration regarding the deadly flesh eating bacteria known as the Epstein Files is that Trump wants to take over the District of Columbia and claw back its home rule status.
The jagged logic behind this earth rattling move is that the D.C. is overwhelmed with crime and its present governance is unable to cope with the problem.
For the uninitiated, Trump has always had a burr in his saddle regarding Black men and women in governance. Since the mayor of D.C. is a Black woman, that sticks in his craw that she and her council have authority to make rules and laws in the nation’s capital.
For all intents and purposes, Donald Trump wants to return to the glorious days of being “Massa” of the Negroes in D.C. He wants to control their behavior and habits and impose his will upon them since, how in the world can such people govern themselves without his grace and benevolent intervention?
If you look at his “hit list” of Black celebrities and newsmakers to wit: Oprah Winfrey, Barack Obama, Gayle King, Jennifer Crockett, Beyonce, et al., these are people of color who have not bent a knee to Trump nor have they given him any deference that he sorely desires.
Donald Trump wants a plantation type of governance with the D.C., insofar as he wants either himself of a hand pick board of sycophants who will rule the roost in D.C. to make sure that the Negroes behave themselves and do not give the white residents any cause for undue alarm.
In another Massa move, Trump is seeking one billion dollars from UCLA with the threat that Trump will curtain all federal funding to the stellar university until they meet stringent qualifications to again receive federal funds for research.
Of course, one of the primary demands from Trump to UCLA is to make sure that no non-students are admitted who are deemed not qualified and to show justifications when such a non-white student is admitted over a white student!
Trump even wants the university to submit to a overseeing monitor who will micromanage the admissions process and to compare GPA’s and college entry scores of non-white students and white students to make sure that “those” non-white students are not given any admission preferences.
Trump, whose knowledge of American history can be stored in a thimble, is totally bereft of that history when it comes to hundreds of years of intentional denial of minority students to higher education; for the simple reason of white racism. Full stop.
Trump does not seek a society in which wrongs are righted or that access is afforded to those whom but for racial reasons, were denied entry in higher education, professional schools government and the military. All prior bastions of white supremacy.
Trump, being the blatant white nationalist that he is, wants to make America great again and that “great again” is a reference point to the sordid American history in which racial hostility and segregation was the rule of the day.
Trump is fixated on an era of American history by which and in which the white American male sat at the top of the totem pole and his word was fiat. The forties, fifties and sixties were epochs in which Black dissent was brutally opposed and people of color were relegated to the edges of society, menial jobs and daily humiliations just to live.
That is Trump’s idea of a great America.
By putting the knife of threatened cut offs of federal funding to the throats of schools (Harvard, Brown Columbia, etc.) that Trump deems “too liberal” for his liking, he is determined to reshape higher education in his perverted image.
If you are part of the administration of a school of higher education and you depend upon large grants of federal monies to conduct vital research for the good of all, you have a hard choice to make. You either capitulate to the rantings of an angry, illiterate bully and pay him forced settlement monies or you have to redo your budgets to forego the loss of vital federal monies.
If this was a Mafia movie, the gangster is shaking down the store owner for some big bucks because the gangster would hate to see something “happen” to the store.
With a complicit GOP fawning over Trump, do not count on those docile sheep to utter a word in protest because if they do, Trump will threaten to have them primaried, or in the alternative spew nasty words about them so they will fall in line.
What a shameful specter of grown men and women, doing a jig for Trump whenever he looks their way. It is their way of how smaller dogs turn on their backs and expose their bellies to a bigger bully dog. A doggie way of saying, “I’ll be good! Don’t bite me. You are my superior!”
Will these affected universities hold the line and tell Trump to step off, or, will they be good doggies and flip on their backs so as to save themselves?
Only time will tell but what is now being experienced, Trump and his clown car of buffoons are determined to not encourage a diverse society where people of color can play in the same sand box as and with white Americans.
The tale of the tape will happen when the tariffs and the onerous portions of the fabled “Big Beautiful Bill” hits white America in their pocketbooks; for those who dare to think for themselves, they will finally realize that the con is on them from a convicted felon who sits in the White House laughing all the way to the bank.
America is coming to a critical period in its history that it either rejects the oncoming shadow of an autocrat or it simply, out of sheer fatigue, gives in to Dear Leader and his band of un principled rascals.
Contact Lafe Tolliver at tolliver@juno.com