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Donald Trump, America’s combative sitting President, should be congratulated by supporters and critics alike for his ruthlessly “honest” public confession at the memorial for slain conservative activist Charlie Kirk on September 21 that his philosophy towards opponents was very different from that of his late follower. “Charlie did not hate his opponents. I disagree. I hate my opponents. I don’t want the best for them”. Since POTUS has now “honestly” declared that he is a “hate-generating” leader, and he has nearly 40 months to go before demitting office, one shudders to contemplate what awaits the $30 trillion GDP economic superpower that is America in the 21st century. Take a look at the book The Next Civil War: Dispatches from the American Future, written by Stephen Marche, a Canadian, in January 2022. It was a sensational description of the January 6, 2021 insurrection at the US Capitol incited by Mr Trump after he was defeated in the 2020 presidential election, and blindly followed by the foot soldiers of his “Make America Great Again” (MAGA) movement, whose unprecedented ransacking of the US capital set the contours of the tsunami which today has created nasty and endless woes for America and its people. It would be an understatement to say that America today is in distress internally. Why that matters to people living thousands of miles away, on the other side of the planet, is because this US chaos is inflicting unexpected and unforeseen damage to global connectivity, also known as “globalisation”, and India is deeply linked to it through various bilateral and multilateral systems. Also, within the US, there are five million people of Indian origin, whose notable contribution to and performance in America’s economic and technological development is indisputable. And the ambience in America is getting so charged on race and colour factors, mainly due to divisive climate of “hate” generated by the US establishment, that the concern of Indians is wholly justified. There are real fears in responsible quarters that this “hate-filled” racial and colour prejudice may very well lead to a “race war” in the United States. Someone who is close to POTUS needs to have the courage of conviction to persuade Donald Trump that a campaign driven by hate is unlikely to secure for him the coveted Nobel Prize for Peace, no matter how many bilateral or multilateral summits he may attend towards that end. “Hate” is not “peace”, in fact, hate leads to violence and bloodshed, quite the antithesis of peace. America also needs to confront its own troubled history. More than many other nations which are more socially cohesive, the United States internally is still trying to reconcile its racial and ethnic discord and, being a nation built by generations of immigrants, needs harmony at home. One may revisit the words of Stephen Marche: “The unimaginable has become an everyday matter in America… If you read about them in any other country, you would think a civil war has already begun.” What adds to the fears of a possible civil war is the easy availability of guns in America -- a nation of 340 million people has over 400 million guns, and more than a trillion rounds of ammunition, and a political system which is totally resistant to any effective controls on gun ownership. It won’t take much to light a spark. Then bring in the race factor. Donald Trump’s MAGA supporters possibly visualise the United States as an exclusively white nation, having obviously forgotten its shameful history of slavery, where shiploads of black Africans were brought in chains to work in the plantations in Virginia and elsewhere for generations. He must also have forgotten the legacy of another President, Abraham Lincoln, who had declared the US could not continue to remain “half slave and half free”. The Civil War that followed established the principle that blacks were as much US citizens as whites, though it would take another century for the Civil Rights Act in the 1960s to take it forward. However, the ugly face of race is once again resurfacing in Trump’s America, and policymakers seem unable to tackle this threat effectively due to their own catastrophic mistakes. Only recently the German-origin Eric Schmitt, junior senator from Missouri, contemptuously warned that the problem of immigration was not the people; but “it’s about non-Europeans stealing the birthright of the descendants of America’s original Christian settlers”. America is clearly heading towards a race war-like situation in near future. Much of this actually began during Mr Trump’s first term. Amy Wax, a law professor at the University of Pennsylvania, had said in 2019: “Our country would be better off with more whites and fewer non-whites”. Another US senator, Bernie Moreno, recently proposed a law to “curb outsourcing and promote domestic employment by imposing a 25 per cent levy on payments made by American companies to foreign workers”. The ongoing all-out assault on...
