A glance at Mary Trump shows the bloodline she shares with Donald J. Trump. The former and possibly next President of the United States, in one respect resembles another US politician, Robert F. Kennedy Jr, many of whose relatives have been his most acerbic public critics, whatever be their motives. In the case of Donald Trump’s fierce critic Mary Trump, it is clear from her latest book “The Reckoning” that she has a humanist worldview. With the precision of a surgeon, she analyses the trauma suffered by Native Americans and Black Americans. In the case of Native Americans, she points out that the Puritans who came over from England ostensibly in pursuit of freedom reduced the population of the original inhabitants of the US from nine million to a little over two hundred thousand over the course of a century of bloodlust. Very little has been written about such a humanitarian catastrophe, including by those who have expended reams of print in describing culling of sections of the population in continents such as Asia or Africa but never their own.
Dispossessed of their land and their lives, Native Americans have receded in the public consciousness of their country to a footnote. As for Black Americans, Mary Trump describes how the US Civil War, which was meant to fight for the liberation of slaves, was won on the battlefield and lost subsequently, in large part as a consequence of the disastrous decision of President Lincoln to appoint an individual with views entirely the opposite of his, Andrew Johnson, as his running mate while launching his successful bid for a second term in the White House. Johnson had been a slave owner himself and was a supporter of the very system that Lincoln had entered into a civil war with the Confederacy to eliminate.
After the Civil War, helped by Jackson, who became President after Lincoln was assassinated, Black Americans were thrust back into servitude, despite being technically freed by the Emancipation Proclamation. Whether there were individuals who conspired with John Wilkes Booth to have Lincoln murdered because they knew Jackson was a segregationist and a white supremacist remains a question that has generated almost no interest amongst historians. All too often, the truth gets buried and very soon forgotten under the shroud of “conspiracy theory” placed on it, sometimes by the very perpetrators of the crimes that the “conspiracy theorists” have sought to expose. Concerning the assassination of Lincoln and Kennedy, and the deaths through shooting of Booth and Lee Harvey Oswald (the killer of John F. Kennedy) soon after their own murderous deeds, few have sought to delve back so as to add more substantiation to several rough and apparently incomplete edges in the brief reports, mostly in newspapers, that were published about the killings of the assassins themselves.
Had he lived, President Lincoln would have ensured that the “freedom” given to Black Americans was not simply a mirage but became a reality. Mary Trump shows how even the GI Bill that was passed during the Roosevelt administration in practice excluded Black Americans from its benefits, thereby further perpetuating the injustices already heavy on their shoulders. Whatever the colour of a human being, he or she has the same potential as any other, and the US has suffered as a consequence of its failure to ensure justice to Black Americans, something that was attempted and to an extent made operational in 1965 by President Lyndon Baines Johnson through Civil Rights Laws that Mary Trump’s relative may once again seek to roll back if elected President of the US in November. Several hundred thousand Black Americans who were found guilty of minor offences were subjected to lengthy prison terms as a consequence of the tweaking of criminal law by President Clinton, whose concern for Black Americans was simply theatre designed to ensure their political support.
President Biden, who is unwilling to spend a hundredth of the money that he wants to provide Ukraine on Haiti, a country going through torment but not being located in Europe, needs to do more and spend more, much more, to solve problems in the US such as a non-existent southern border and the differential life paths of black and white Americans that persist into the 21st century. Joe Biden, who entered the White House as its lawful occupant as a consequence of the vote of Black Americans, needs to get dissolved suspicions that his obsession with lavishing money on Ukraine is because Volodymyr Zelenskyy has some compromising material on him that he is worried will be revealed by the former comedian. He needs to do that by making the ensuring of justice to Black Americans and by ensuring that the southern border is sealed, so as to prevent agents of the CCP as well as religious extremists from some conflict zones streaming into the US to cause horrible consequences at a later date.