Should Donald Trump be prosecuted on charges filed by the Manhattan DA? When two million poor people are in prison, how can Trump not be put on trial?
Trump should have been jailed decades ago. He conspired with his daddy―Ku Klux Klan supporter Fred Trump―to keep Black people out of his family-owned apartment complexes.
In 1980, Donald Trump hired Polish immigrants to demolish the building on Manhattan’s posh Fifth Avenue that became the site of his flagship skyscraper, Trump Tower. They were given almost no safety equipment to remove deadly asbestos and paid just $5 per hour while working 12-hour shifts. Some must have died later of mesothelioma, a deadly lung cancer.
In 1989, Trump ran full-page newspaper ads demanding the return of the death penalty in New York state. This was in response to the arrest of Antron McCray, Kevin Richardson, Yusef Salaam, Raymond Santana and Korey Wise on charges of raping and beating a woman jogging in New York City’s Central Park.
False confessions were coerced by police from these five Black and Latinx youth. They spent years in prison for crimes they did not commit before being exonerated. Trump’s racist campaign helped frame them.
When he announced his presidential campaign on June 16, 2015, Trump denounced Mexican people as “rapists.” One day later a white fascist murdered nine Black people in a Charleston, South Carolina, church.
Trump’s racist rhetoric promotes fascist violence. White anti-racist Heather Heyer was murdered by a Trump supporter during the 2017 neo-Nazi mobilization in Charlottesville, Virginia. Trump’s response to Heather’s death was to claim there were “fine people on both sides,” meaning both the Nazis and their opponents.
Trump bombed and killed thousands in Afghanistan, Iraq and Syria. As president he helped starve children in Yemen while keeping immigrant children in cages in the United States.
By refusing to take absolutely necessary public health measures―as was done in the socialist People’s Republic of China, socialist Cuba and the Socialist Republic of Vietnam―Trump condemned hundreds of thousands to die of COVID-19. At the same time, he promoted anti-Asian hate that led to the 2021 Atlanta spa murders.
Trump wanted to declare martial law to suppress the Black Lives Matter movement in 2020. Every killer cop knows Trump is on their side.
The Jan. 6, 2021, fascist insurrection in the U.S. Capitol that attempted to overturn the presidential election was instigated by Trump.
None of these crimes will be covered in the New York indictment. They should be. It should be remembered, however, that the gangster Al Capone wasn’t convicted of murder but of not paying his income tax.
Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg, a Black man, has been the target of racist attacks from Trump supporters. The only reason Trump was charged with anything was because of the deep, justified hostility of millions of poor and working people.
This is particularly so in the Asian, Black, Indigenous and Latinx communities. Trump supporters are now targeting transgender people.
Some may question whether indicting Trump will drive more Republican voters to the polls. Trial or no trial, only by mobilizing the power of the people can all the Trumps be defeated.
Never forget that Kalief Browder, a Black youth, spent over two years in New York City’s notorious Rikers Island prison simply because he couldn’t make bail. After being released, without being convicted, he was driven by the cruelty in Rikers to hang himself.
If Kalief Browder can be jailed, so can the super-rich racist pig Donald Trump.
Jail Trump!
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