Donald Trump caused a minor kerfuffle this week when he styled himself “a Modern Day Nelson Mandela.”
Specifically, the former president saw a common thread connecting the beloved anti-apartheid icon’s 27 years in prison and his own trial, beginning Monday, over hush money paid to an adult-film actress.
“He is definitely delusional,” Zwelivelile “Mandla” Mandela, grandson of the great man, told the Times of London.
Delusional, maybe — but also modest! Mandla Mandela must not have realized that Trump, in comparing himself to one of the towering figures of the 20th century, was in fact demoting himself. A couple of weeks earlier, Trump had shared a post on his social media site that likened him to Jesus.
A humble Trump said this week on Truth Social that it would be a “GREAT HONOR,” to be a modern Mandela. (Back in October, he had said dismissively that “I don’t mind being Nelson Mandela.”) But this honor apparently wasn’t great enough. Two days later, Trump suggested in an interview that he is even greater than the Great Emancipator, Abraham Lincoln, though he had been advised not to say so publicly.
Trump explained to his host on the MAGA outlet “Real America’s Voice” that “nobody’s done more than I have” for Black people. “I say nobody’s done more since Abraham Lincoln,” he elaborated. “I actually wanted to go beyond Abraham Lincoln, but some people thought that wasn’t a good thing to do.”
Hey, it ain’t bragging if it’s true.
To borrow a Lincoln phrase (Trump has the “best words,” but Lincoln’s were pretty good, too), it is altogether fitting and proper for Trump to compare himself with a Civil War-era leader. This is because, thanks largely to Trump, the rights of American women have just been returned to where they were 160 years ago.
Trump accurately boasts that “I was able to kill Roe v. Wade” and “I was proudly the person responsible.” As a result of his achievement, conservatives on Arizona’s Supreme Court, freed by Roe’s demise, resurrected on Tuesday an 1864 law that bans nearly all abortions, even in cases of rape and incest, from the moment of conception. Trump invited just such Wild West jurisprudence the day before, when he said abortion policy should be left “up to the states.” Now, Arizona has restored women’s health care to an era when bloodletting and mercury pills were the standard of care, and patients had limbs sawed off without anesthesia.
Maybe Trump should stick with the Mandela comparison. After all, the similarities are uncanny!
Mandela led the African National Congress. Trump led white nationalists to attack Congress.
Mandela did 18 years of hard labor on Robben Island. Trump made the hard decisions for 14 seasons on “The Apprentice.”
Mandela won the Nobel Peace Prize with F.W. DeKlerk for abolishing apartheid. Trump won both the Club Championship trophy and Senior Club Championship trophy at Trump International Golf Club.
Mandela built the Truth and Reconciliation Commission to heal South Africa. Trump built Truth Social after he got kicked off of Twitter.
But dare we hope that Trump, on his Long Walk to Megalomania, might pause to think about what Mandela actually represented?
While Trump, like Stalin, calls the press “the enemy of the people,” Mandela argued that “a critical, independent and investigative press is the lifeblood of any democracy.”
While Trump fans racial resentment and cultural paranoia, Mandela taught us: “It is not our diversity which divides us; it is not our ethnicity, or religion or culture that divides us. Since we have achieved our freedom, there can only be one division amongst us: between those who cherish democracy and those who do not.”
In that struggle of our time between democracy and its opponents, Trump is heir not to Mandela but to his jailers.
Just hours after wrapping himself in the mantle of Mandela, Trump revisited his assertion in 2018 that African nations (along with Haiti and El Salvador) were “s---hole countries.” At a fundraiser at a hedge-fund billionaire’s home in Palm Beach, Fla., where Trump raised a reported $50 million for his campaign, the GOP and his legal defense, Trump said that others took his remarks as “a very terrible comment, but I felt it was fine.”
The New York Times’s Maggie Haberman and Michael Gold reported that, at the closed-door event (during which he promised the high-rollers more tax cuts), Trump complained about immigrants “coming in from just unbelievable places and countries, countries that are a disaster.” He reiterated his desire to welcome immigrants from Denmark, Switzerland and Norway rather than from places such as Yemen, “where they’re blowing each other up all over the place.”
In his interview the next day with Real America’s Voice, the modern-day Mandela again raised fears of dangerous, dark-skinned invaders. Without evidence, he informed his host that “they came in last night: numerous people from the Congo in Africa. They came in from the Congo. They were in jail in the Congo and now they’re living a beautiful life in the United States.”
http://www.washingtonpost.com/opini..._magnet-op2024elections _inline_collection_20
The truly historic nature of Trump’s many assertions of his own greatness is that he can portray himself as Mandela, or Jesus, or Lincoln or Alexei Navalny (which he has also done), and a significant proportion of his followers will believe it. A Post-Schar School poll shows just how deep this pathology runs.
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Specifically, the former president saw a common thread connecting the beloved anti-apartheid icon’s 27 years in prison and his own trial, beginning Monday, over hush money paid to an adult-film actress.
“He is definitely delusional,” Zwelivelile “Mandla” Mandela, grandson of the great man, told the Times of London.
Delusional, maybe — but also modest! Mandla Mandela must not have realized that Trump, in comparing himself to one of the towering figures of the 20th century, was in fact demoting himself. A couple of weeks earlier, Trump had shared a post on his social media site that likened him to Jesus.
A humble Trump said this week on Truth Social that it would be a “GREAT HONOR,” to be a modern Mandela. (Back in October, he had said dismissively that “I don’t mind being Nelson Mandela.”) But this honor apparently wasn’t great enough. Two days later, Trump suggested in an interview that he is even greater than the Great Emancipator, Abraham Lincoln, though he had been advised not to say so publicly.
Trump explained to his host on the MAGA outlet “Real America’s Voice” that “nobody’s done more than I have” for Black people. “I say nobody’s done more since Abraham Lincoln,” he elaborated. “I actually wanted to go beyond Abraham Lincoln, but some people thought that wasn’t a good thing to do.”
Hey, it ain’t bragging if it’s true.
To borrow a Lincoln phrase (Trump has the “best words,” but Lincoln’s were pretty good, too), it is altogether fitting and proper for Trump to compare himself with a Civil War-era leader. This is because, thanks largely to Trump, the rights of American women have just been returned to where they were 160 years ago.
Trump accurately boasts that “I was able to kill Roe v. Wade” and “I was proudly the person responsible.” As a result of his achievement, conservatives on Arizona’s Supreme Court, freed by Roe’s demise, resurrected on Tuesday an 1864 law that bans nearly all abortions, even in cases of rape and incest, from the moment of conception. Trump invited just such Wild West jurisprudence the day before, when he said abortion policy should be left “up to the states.” Now, Arizona has restored women’s health care to an era when bloodletting and mercury pills were the standard of care, and patients had limbs sawed off without anesthesia.
Maybe Trump should stick with the Mandela comparison. After all, the similarities are uncanny!
Mandela led the African National Congress. Trump led white nationalists to attack Congress.
Mandela did 18 years of hard labor on Robben Island. Trump made the hard decisions for 14 seasons on “The Apprentice.”
Mandela won the Nobel Peace Prize with F.W. DeKlerk for abolishing apartheid. Trump won both the Club Championship trophy and Senior Club Championship trophy at Trump International Golf Club.
Mandela built the Truth and Reconciliation Commission to heal South Africa. Trump built Truth Social after he got kicked off of Twitter.
But dare we hope that Trump, on his Long Walk to Megalomania, might pause to think about what Mandela actually represented?
While Trump, like Stalin, calls the press “the enemy of the people,” Mandela argued that “a critical, independent and investigative press is the lifeblood of any democracy.”
While Trump fans racial resentment and cultural paranoia, Mandela taught us: “It is not our diversity which divides us; it is not our ethnicity, or religion or culture that divides us. Since we have achieved our freedom, there can only be one division amongst us: between those who cherish democracy and those who do not.”
In that struggle of our time between democracy and its opponents, Trump is heir not to Mandela but to his jailers.
Just hours after wrapping himself in the mantle of Mandela, Trump revisited his assertion in 2018 that African nations (along with Haiti and El Salvador) were “s---hole countries.” At a fundraiser at a hedge-fund billionaire’s home in Palm Beach, Fla., where Trump raised a reported $50 million for his campaign, the GOP and his legal defense, Trump said that others took his remarks as “a very terrible comment, but I felt it was fine.”
The New York Times’s Maggie Haberman and Michael Gold reported that, at the closed-door event (during which he promised the high-rollers more tax cuts), Trump complained about immigrants “coming in from just unbelievable places and countries, countries that are a disaster.” He reiterated his desire to welcome immigrants from Denmark, Switzerland and Norway rather than from places such as Yemen, “where they’re blowing each other up all over the place.”
In his interview the next day with Real America’s Voice, the modern-day Mandela again raised fears of dangerous, dark-skinned invaders. Without evidence, he informed his host that “they came in last night: numerous people from the Congo in Africa. They came in from the Congo. They were in jail in the Congo and now they’re living a beautiful life in the United States.”
http://www.washingtonpost.com/opini..._magnet-op2024elections _inline_collection_20
The truly historic nature of Trump’s many assertions of his own greatness is that he can portray himself as Mandela, or Jesus, or Lincoln or Alexei Navalny (which he has also done), and a significant proportion of his followers will believe it. A Post-Schar School poll shows just how deep this pathology runs.
ADVERTISIN