A little over seven years to the day, I wrote an article titled Profanity and racism: an example of how not to lead here on Rant Roulette. It was about the comments of one Donald J. Trump who somehow found his way into the White House. His comments on immigration caught the attention of CNN. I’ll quote these comments again here:
Why do we want all these people from Africa here? They’re shithole countries … We should have more people from Norway.
(Pardon the profanity, but this is what he said.) This is arguably the least of his missteps.
I haven’t forgotten about this, even if most people have. At the time I wrote, in part:
Supposedly, DJT also referred to Haiti with this profane word. Norway is mostly people of fairer skin, as is most of the population of the Scandinavian countries. I don’t think it’s a coincidence that human excrement also tends to be darker shades of brown.
This kind of remark goes beyond any possible boundary of human decency and is completely unacceptable by someone who is supposed to represent our country as its leader. The use of a profane word only serves to underscore the lack of intelligence of the person who uttered it, and for an elected official, let alone the (nominally) elected leader of our country, to say this kind of thing is downright un-American. This is the single most un-American thing DJT has said.
Dare I say it, this aged rather well. DJT said and did some more un-American things later in his term, though I do think he topped himself by dismantling the framework Obama had left behind to deal with an epidemic or pandemic, making the COVID-19 pandemic much worse here than it should have been. In some respects, we are still not completely back to normal.
And what did the people do this past November? They proved H. L. Mencken’s rather famous statement quite true: “No one in this world, so far as I know… has ever lost money by underestimating the intelligence of the great masses of the plain people.” (This is the same statement often misattributed to P. T. Barnum.)
Our Founding Fathers never explicitly forbade felons from being elected to a Federal office. They figured people would be smart enough not to vote for someone with a criminal record such as DJT’s. Someone who actively encouraged a violent attempt at overthrowing our government. Actually, what DJT did came dangerously close to treason. It definitely crossed far over the line of what’s considered acceptable conduct by a president, especially one leaving office.
Apparently, here in 2024 and now 2025, they were wrong. Dare I say it, our education system has failed us. In the interest in getting voter turnout up, we have made it trivially easy for people to register to vote (see the National Voter Registration Act of 1993 a.k.a. the “Motor Voter” Act). In some states, you don’t even have to register at all. The consequence of that is a lot of people who really don’t understand the issues voting for whoever looks better on TV.
He shouldn’t be there again. But he is. And those of us who knew better and voted for Kamala Harris still have to deal with the fallout.
I’m not sure how to fix this, other than maybe:
- The parties doing a better job of keep candidates like DJT off the ballot to begin with; and
- Better education, both of future voters and current voters (specifically, going back to the way things were and requiring clear labeling of commentary versus actual news reports).
Maybe there are other things we could do. I know DJT did far worse than referring to countries with primarily darker-skinned inhabitants as “shithole countries”, but it’s something no other occupant of the office of president had done before and is definitely conduct unbecoming of the office of President of the United States. It’s something I’m sure DJT wishes we’d forget, along with the many other instances of conduct unbecoming throughout his first term.
And that’s why I’m reblogging this: I’ll do everything I can to be sure it isn’t forgotten.