{"id":54330,"date":"2020-09-14T08:44:46","date_gmt":"2020-09-14T12:44:46","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.trinidadandtobagonews.com\/blog\/?p=54330"},"modified":"2020-09-14T08:43:26","modified_gmt":"2020-09-14T12:43:26","slug":"a-cautionary-tale","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/www.trinidadandtobagonews.com\/blog\/?p=54330","title":{"rendered":"A Cautionary Tale"},"content":{"rendered":"

By Dr Selwyn Cudjoe
\nSeptember 14, 2020<\/em><\/p>\n

\"Dr.<\/a>Over 6.5 million people in the United States are afflicted with the coronavirus, while 194,000 people have died from it. More Americans have died collectively from this virus than those who died in the Korean, Vietnam and Iraq wars and the World Trade Center bombing.
\n
\nHad President Donald Trump acted in a timelier manner, fewer people would have been affected by the virus and the death toll would have been lower. While Trump was telling Americans one thing publicly, he was saying something differently in private. Greg Weiner noted: \u201cPresident Trump\u2019s taped admission to Bob Woodward that he deliberately misled Americans about the danger of the coronavirus makes him morally culpable in the ensuing tragedy.\u201d (New York Times, September 11.)<\/p>\n

In February 2020 while Trump was telling Americans the virus would go away in days, he told Woodward, author of Rage, privately, \u201cThis is deadly stuff.\u201d<\/p>\n

In March, while Trump told Americans that children were \u201calmost immune\u201d to the virus, he said to Woodward: \u201cJust today and yesterday, some startling facts came out. It is not just old, older. Young people, too\u2014plenty of young people.\u201d<\/p>\n

In April as Trump urged governors to open up their states for business, he told Woodward the virus is \u201cso easily transmissible, you won\u2019t even believe it\u201d.<\/p>\n

That was irresponsible advice.<\/p>\n

Trump showed callous indifference toward black lives. When Woodward pointed out that he and Trump enjoyed \u201cwhite privilege\u201d and asked if he was working \u201cto understand the anger and the pain, particularly, black people feel in this country\u201d, Trump responded, \u201cNo.\u201d He chastised Woodward: \u201cYou really drank the Kool-Aid, didn\u2019t you? Just listen to you. Wow. No, I don\u2019t feel that at all.\u201d (Quotes taken from New York Times, September 9.)<\/p>\n

In 1974, a former doorman at one of Trump\u2019s buildings in Brooklyn revealed: \u201cA supervisor told me that if a black person came to 2560 Ocean Parkway and enquired about an apartment for rent, and he was not there at the time, I should tell him that the rent was twice as much as it really was, in order that he could not afford the apartment.\u201d (FBI files).<\/p>\n

In October 1973, the Civil Rights Division filed a lawsuit against Trump Management Company, Donald Trump and his father, Fred Trump, alleging that African Americans and Puerto Ricans were systematically excluded from apartments. The Trumps and their company settled this lawsuit by entering into a consent decree in which the Trump companies agreed to institute \u201ca series of safeguards to make sure apartments were rented without regards to race, colour, religion, sex or national origin\u201d (Politico). Trump\u2019s racial animus against black people was one reason why white people in rural America supported his 2016 presidential bid so enthusiastically. An NBC News national exit poll showed Trump disproportionately \u201cappealed to both white men and women living in rural America. Sixty-two per cent of small-town and rural Americans voted for Trump.\u201d<\/p>\n

A Pew Research Center Survey suggested that \u201cbroad economic concerns of rural white Americans\u201d were \u201caligned with several key issues that were among the cornerstones of the Trump campaign: jobs, immigrants and fears about eroding standard of living\u201d.<\/p>\n

Pessimism also reigned among these people. They were concerned about their children\u2019s future. A third of rural whites believe their children will have a worse living standard when they are their age. (Rich Morin, \u201cBehind Trump\u2019s win…\u201d, November 17, 2016.)<\/p>\n

Trump\u2019s war against China did not help whites in rural America. Tom Vilsack, Obama\u2019s Secretary of Agriculture, noted: \u201cChina simply reduced purchases from American farms and turned to Europe. Lost exports reduced farm income far below the levels enjoyed during the Obama-Biden administration. US farmers took a hit, and so did the rural place they called home.\u201d<\/p>\n

Covid-19 also hit rural America hard. Relying on the president\u2019s assurances, the meat-packing industry \u201cfailed to take preventive measures, causing the virus to spread quickly. Plants had to shut down, increasing market disruption and lost revenue and salaries for producers and workers.\u201d Healthline reveals that rural America could be the region that is hit hardest by Covid-19 (August 3, 2020). Today, many of these rural workers indicate they will vote for Joe Biden.<\/p>\n

The suffering among rural whites is real. Its inhabitants feel threatened by job losses, social fragmentation, drug addiction, suicide and wage stagnation, but their mistake was to regard Trump as their saviour. Trump does not care particularly for poor whites or black and brown people. Trump cares about himself, and that was their undoing.<\/p>\n

Sometimes we vote for those who we think have our best interest at heart, but once the election is over they show little concern for their supporters. Recently in T&T we witnessed the unequal treatment in Covid-19 arrests among certain segments of our society. While police officers advised those in Bayside Towers (read white) \u201cwho were involved in breaking the law to disperse before they arrived… Groups of young black men of Sea Lots were made to lie on the ground while being subjected to police cameras\u201d (Express, September 11).<\/p>\n

Incidentally, Stuart Young and Faris Al-Rawi, our chief law enforcer, recused themselves 94 times from Cabinet business. We are told that is irrelevant. Sometimes we vote with our hearts rather than our minds. Sometimes those who you expect to act in your interest are often the first to betray your trust.<\/p>\n

Trump\u2019s betrayal of rural whites is a cautionary tale. Many of them still believe in him, but only time will tell how wise they were\/are to place their trust in this conman. Some of them will pay for their mistaken beliefs with their lives.<\/p>\n

A word of caution: be wary of those in whom you place your trust and your fate.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

By Dr Selwyn Cudjoe September 14, 2020 Over 6.5 million people in the United States are afflicted with the coronavirus, while 194,000 people have died from it. More Americans have died collectively from this virus than those who died in the Korean, Vietnam and Iraq wars and the World Trade Center bombing.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":4,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"ngg_post_thumbnail":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[1,33,5,39],"tags":[1476,1142,171],"class_list":["post-54330","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-general-tt","category-health","category-international","category-usa","tag-covid-19","tag-donald-trump","tag-selwyn-r-cudjoe"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.trinidadandtobagonews.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/54330","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.trinidadandtobagonews.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.trinidadandtobagonews.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.trinidadandtobagonews.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/4"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.trinidadandtobagonews.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=54330"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"http:\/\/www.trinidadandtobagonews.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/54330\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":54331,"href":"http:\/\/www.trinidadandtobagonews.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/54330\/revisions\/54331"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.trinidadandtobagonews.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=54330"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.trinidadandtobagonews.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=54330"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.trinidadandtobagonews.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=54330"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}