On January 23d the penultimate round of the NAFTA renegotiation process will commence in Montreal, Canada but in the absence of the three major players: at the insistence of Donald Trump, the principals, Robert Lighthizer, Ildefonso Guajardo and Chrystia Freeland will go to Davos, Switzerland, for private contingency talks. On January 28th they will join their subordinates in Montreal and reliable sources inside the Canadian Parliament have indicated to the Canadian press that they will announce Trump´s intention to withdraw the U.S. team from the negotiation process. The general consensus now is that it will be done to punish Mexico and entirely for racist reasons. As all of us recall, in 2015, while announcing his decision to run for the presidency of the United States, Trump launched into an inexplicable and irrational attack against Mexico by screaming that Mexico is not sending its best people to the U.S. but is flooding the U.S. with criminals, drug traffickers and rapists. That was then – and now his uncontrolled racism has reached hitherto un-heard-of depths of obscenity: this past week during a meeting at the White House he screamed that the immigrants from El Salvador, Haiti and Africa come from “shithole countries” causing an international outcry which was followed by his blatant denial that he is a racist and that he would prefer to welcome immigrants from all-white Norway!
Well, Trump’s racism can be traced back to his early upbringing in a family headed by his grandfather who fled to the U.S. to escape prosecution for trying to overthrow the German Imperial Government. His father was a member of the feared Ku Klux Klan and was arrested in New York while attending the lynching of a catholic Italian-American. In 1973, Trump and his despicable father were the subject of a federal lawsuit for racial discrimination against African Americans in refusing to rent apartments to them while giving preferential treatment to whites. In 1989, Trump paid for full-page ads in the New York newspapers calling for the death penalty for five teenagers – four black, one Mexican-american – who had been falsely accused of raping a white girl. Despite DNA evidence that proved their innocence, Trump still maintains that they are guilty and should have been executed! Trump also has a long history of making racist remarks about all immigrants of color especially calling Mexicans criminals and rapists and accusing a federal judge, overseeing a case of criminal fraud against his so-called Trump University, unfit to be able to be a fair adjudicator of the case because the judge’s parents are Mexican immigrants. As a candidate for the presidency, he also called for the total and complete shutdown of Muslims entering the U.S. and followed through with his administration’s Muslim ban in January of 2017. The New York times reported one month ago that he said: all Haitians have AIDS and Nigerian immigrants will never go back to their huts after coming to the U.S.. All of us also recall his irrational insistence, without any proof whatsoever, that Barack Obama was born in Kenya and not a U.S. citizen – thereby trying to undermine the legitimacy of the first African American president. Still, despite his disgusting racism, 78% of his Republican Party followership still refuse to condemn him! So, if he wants to abandon this week’s NAFTA negotiations, let’s tell him: “Good bye and good riddance!”
By: Dr. Juan Carlos Botello and Dr. Werner G.C. Voigt independent external contributor
