Trump Is Just Trying To Make Obama Cry
Note: This story originally appeared on my blog on May 9, 2018.
Pharoah Thutmose III attempted to erase his stepmother (and co-ruler) Queen Hatsheput from the historical records of Egypt after her death, having his workers destroy her statues and scratch her name out of the hieroglyphics on temple walls. The Roman emperor, Elagabalus, was subjected to damnatio memoriae — the practice of scrubbing public records of any mention of a disgraced individual — upon his assassination in 222.
Why am I telling you this? I mention this because Donald Trump seems intent on doing the same thing to Barack Obama. In addition to attempting to repeal DACA, rolling back Obama-era environmental regulations, and pulling the United States out of the Paris Agreement, Trump announced yesterday that he was reneging on the Iran Nuclear Deal. The Iran Nuclear Deal, an agreement between the United States, other permanent members of the UN Security Council, Germany and the Islamic Republic of Iran, ended sanctions on Iran in exchange for Iran’s agreement to suspend its efforts to make nuclear weapons and to submit to regular monitoring by the International Atomic Energy Agency. As of this writing, there is no evidence indicating that the Iranians violated the deal.
What. The. Fuck?!?
After my blood pressure went back down, I began to wonder why Donald Trump would do something so monumentally stupid, especially now that he is getting ready to negotiate a similar deal with the North Koreans. Trump’s withdrawal from the deal not only fails to make Americans safer, it directly endangers the entire world.
Then I remembered who is driving the car — Donald Trump, the most under-qualified and malignantly incompetent person to ever occupy the Oval Office. Not only does he consistently fail to appreciate the consequences of his actions, he is not the least bit interested in listening to the people who actually do. I also remembered that Trump has nursed a grudge against Obama for years. It was Trump who mainstreamed the birther movement, using his Twitter account to perpetuate the racist lie that Obama wasn’t born in this country and becoming the rather amorphous group’s unofficial leader in the process. And he was furious about the roasting he received at Obama’s hands at the 2011 White House Correspondents’ Dinner.
That’s when I realized that Trump didn’t pull out of the deal because he thought it was bad. He did it just to make Obama — and legions of Obama lovers — cry. Trump wants to hurt Obama and his followers for not only daring to mock him but for daring to create an America where a mixed-race black man with a black wife and two little black girls could reign in the White House for eight years, an America where a woman who happily worked for that black man could also mount a viable presidential campaign.
That unspoken promise to restore white male hegemony is what truly motivated Trump supporters in 2016. By systemically erasing all signs of social progress made by the Obama administration, Trump is taking this pledge a step further by creating an environment where they can simply pretend that Obama never existed at all, let alone served as President of the United States. How else to explain their continued support of The Donald despite his failure to “build the wall,” “drain the swamp” or “lock her up?”
As long as Trump’s damnatio memoriae campaign against Obama continues, the American people can expect even more retrograde reversals of public policy from Trump. One can only hope that the American republic survives long enough to restore Obama’s legacy to memory.
