Tuesday 28 November 2017

equal opportunist

As part of National Native American and Pacific Islander Heritage Month, Dear Dotard invited honourees for a reception at the White House whose role as Navajo code-talkers helped relay planning and operations messages between theatres in a fashion impervious to enemy interception.
Despite the poor optics of holding the exchange squarely underneath a portrait of Andrew Jackson—a rather monstrous individual who as president signed the Indian Removal Act in 1830 and displaced millions on the Trail of Tears, the event seemed fairly well contained and not in danger of derailment—until Trump went off script, presumably recognising that the Navajo tribe were in fact not migrants. “You were here long before any of us were,” he said but unable to resist tossing out a racial slur directed at an opposing voice: “We have a representative in Congress who they say was here a long time ago. They call her Pocahontas.” I would imagine that the collective response of the Native American community would be that difficult to decode.