Key staff and advisors have elicited positive responses from the Ku Klux Klan, writes Aishwarya Kumar.
It was at 7am on a hot summer’s day, July 20, that I had my first interaction with Mike Pompeo, now the director of the CIA, named by President-elect Donald Trump this week.
Pompeo was then the US representative for Kansas’s fourth congressional district.
It was the Republican National Convention (RNC) in Cleveland and Pompeo was oozing charm at a breakfast speech for Kansas delegates.
If you didn’t take a step back to process what he was saying, you’d automatically agree with everything he says. He is a smooth talker. Mainly, he was bashing Hillary Clinton for the way she handled the attack on the US Consulate in Benghazi, Libya, that killed four Americans.
He was part of the house select committee that investigated her. He also told stories about how Mike Pence was a “friend and mentor”.
The director of the CIA, who is pro-waterboarding and rectal feeding, is calling the vice-president-elect “a man of values”.
If you go up to Pompeo and talk to him, he will treat you like a princess. He will shower you with praise, he will shake hands with you, he will smile at you, and he will answer your questions at length. All this will make it seem like he is the nicest person on this planet. Then, you feel queasy when you walk away. You realise everything he said is divisive and conservative. Like expanding the prison in Guantanamo Bay. Like capturing, detaining and torturing detainees.
This man is now going to be in charge of the country’s main spy agency. And when this shock wears off, you turn your attention to the other cabinet picks: Steve Bannon, Reince Priebus, Jeff Sessions and Mike Flynn and realise these picks are worse than Pompeo.
Bannon, who advised Trump during his election campaign, is chief strategist and senior counsellor to the president. Bannon, the founder of Breitbart.com - an extreme right-wing news website - has several domestic violence and sexual assault cases on his head. And when the Ku Klux Klan (KKK) celebrates an appointment, calling it an “excellent move”, you know something is terribly wrong.
So the country is going to be run by a president who was accused of sexual assault and a chief strategist who was formally charged with domestic violence. Sessions, the Alabama senator infamous for opposing LGBTQ equal rights legislation, was named attorney general, sending a jolt through civil rights activists and anybody interested in equality. The most outrageous thing about him is his view that the KKK was okay until he found out they smoked weed.
Many of Trump’s cabinet picks have elicited positive responses from the KKK. If that doesn’t scare you, you need help too.
The man who refused to admit there was voter discrimination in Alabama, a state known to repress voters of a particular community, is the next attorney general. The man who indicted Albert Turner for voter fraud when he found out Turner was helping black people register to vote, is the next attorney general. The man who opposed reforms to reduce mass incarceration is the next attorney general.
And then there is the newly appointed national security adviser, Michael Flynn, a retired Lieutenant-General. He is known for tweeting fake information and believing in unreliable sources, adding to the fear Trump will end up doing the same. He decides which national security and foreign policy questions reach the president, and this combined with him believing anything he sees on the internet will be an atomic combination.
As an example, he retweeted an article from a fake news site healined “Why fear of Muslims is rational”. Imagine him advising the most powerful man in the free world.
Trump’s mantra throughout his campaign was “drain the swamp”, but we should’ve known that phrase, like every other that comes out of his mouth, is a joke. This is not draining the swamp, it’s swimming in the swamp.
* Aishwarya Kumar is from Northwestern University in Chicago and part of the Medill News Service. She is an intern at Cape Argus’ sister paper The Star until next month.
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