View from the MAGA Psychiatric Ward - Part 9

The single most-damning Achilles Heel of the Donald John Trump-chaperoned US-MAGA Republican Government is the curious failure of the Trump Tower and the Mar-a-Largo former Atlantic City, New Jersey, royally failed Casino Operator to soberly and sedately come to terms with the fact that far gone down the garbage can of history are the days when African people were criminally and genocidally imported into the erstwhile New World, presently renamed the Americas and, in our specific instance, the United States of America, as chattel human merchandise or statutorily sanctioned slaves, and could be routinely and cavalierly ordered around and about and be primitively assayed for the worth of humanity, or the abject lack thereof, and their mental and intellectual puissance or acuity by just about any nuisance also-run Plantation Fief or a quaintly self-assured Leader whose leadership was facilely validated through sheer pretense to democratic political culture of the kind poignantly decried and righteously derided by Count Alexis De Tocqueville, the aristocratic French nobleman and reputable scholar and sociologist who undertook the widely celebrated study tour of a relatively newly-recently independent United States of America in the 1830s.

Now, what the foregoing observation means is that the self-classd MAGA Messiah and/or Faux-Christian Healer emerges from the proverbial woodwork onto the global podium of leadership at least two centuries far behind the times. Which simply means that there is an obvious time warp that is eerily symptomatic and/or strikingly reflective of a critical modicum of mental and psychological regression or retardation. But, of course, in our kind of rampantly riotous and recklessly legalistic and scandalously litigious society, we rather prefer to leave the final judgment to those scientifically and medically best qualified to draw the most forensically authoritative conclusions.

On the present occasion, however, we prefer to focus our spotlight on a brief, albeit dramatically masterful, news story which recently appeared in the Atlanta Black Star News of April 15, 2026, that was captioned as follows: “Trump Explodes at Black Reporter, But When He Refuses to Flinch, a Visibly Rattled Trump Pulls a Move that Forces the Room into Dead[ly] [Deathly?] Silence.”

The afore-referenced story had to do with a press or news conference hosted by Mr. Trump during which the renowned Young African American reporter by the name of Zolan Kanno-Youngs, a staff writer from the New York Times, politely demanded to know why a mercilessly routed President Trump was adamantly intent on targeting Iran’s non-military infrastructure resources for “obliteration,” when the Geneva Convention on Human Rights, officially endorsed and ratified by all members of the United Nations Organization (UN), expressly prohibited precisely the same.

As has become his trademark, rather than constructively and intelligently engage Mr. Kanno-Youngs, Mr. Trump catatonically decided to tee-off on a tangent, as it were, by gratuitously taking issue with the quality of journalism practiced at arguably America’s foremost and most widely read daily; on how the supposedly recent poor quality of the media fare of the New York Times had taken a precipitously downward spiral in circulation of the putative “Presidential Newspaper” or the “Official Newspaper” of the United States of America, at least as the present writer learned quite a while back in journalism school, in the mid-1980s, at the City College of New York of the City University of New York (CCNY of CUNY).

Of course, the real, true and the unmistakable import here, from a globally infamous and virulently fascistic President Donald John Trump was that, somehow, both the quality of the journalism and the circulation of the New York Times, which is not to be necessarily confused with the readership of the latter publication, which is decidedly much higher than its sales in print and on the newsstand, were in sharp or precipitous decline because of the poor decision by the Management of the New York Times in hiring “Black” and, consequently, “Mediocre” journalists and writers like Mr. Kanno-Youngs.

You see, for a widely alleged mentally and psychologically addled or spent Mr. Trump, one’s phenotypical Blackness or African American Identity is virtually synonymous with professional mediocrity and the politically progressive policy of Affirmative Action (AA), presently redesignated as the Policy of Diversity, Equity and Inclusion (DEI). Now, we know this critical observation for an unimpeachable fact of forensic inviolability because the caption or the headline of the news story under discussion here deliberately underscores the ideational concept of “Blackness” and/or the African American Identity of Mr. Kanno-Youngs as one that is synonymous with mediocrity.

And then, of course, we also know that the newspaper publication in which the aforereferenced story appeared, namely, the Atlanta Black Star News, is an African American newspaper, presumably, with a predominantly African American audience. Plus the fact that the editor or editors of the Atlanta Black Star News also chose to highlight the fact that Mr. Kanno-Youngs did not “flinch” at the psychologically invidious or rabidly racist attempt on the part of the dubiously elected President Donald John Trump to browbeat the Boston, New England, native.

But what really inspired this column and our present discussion was the report that President Trump had actually “threatened to prosecute journalists [who mustered the chutzpah] to publish information about a downed American jet in Iran earlier this month” - i.e., April. The latter orphan or partial quote, which appears at the tailend of the news story being discussed here is of great significance because in the recent past, American journalists have been routinely embedded with invading US soldiers in the blood-dripping killing fields of Iraq, Libya, Afghanistan and elsewhere.

Even so, such threat, which eerily and strikingly reflects the mindset of a Third-World Military Dictator, than the mindset of the leader of a civilized democratic country, of the so-called Free World, is decidedly pathetic and insufferably repulsive and historically ineffectual, if also because in our Social Media-Saturated Global Village, the kind of Media Censorship being so scandalously imposed by the Trump-presided MAGA regime on American reporters and journalists is straight-out effete, buffonish and heretically obsolescent, all protestations to the contrary on grounds of “National Security” notwithstanding.

To be certain, it is farcically akin to fetching potable water with a wicker fish basket. Hereabouts in the New York Metropolis, we have a tersely worded description for it: “It will not wash.” Even more significantly, this morally and politically benighted edict strikingly reminds us of Nigeria’s Nobel Literature Prize Laureate Professor Wole Soyinka, in particular the erudite scholar and profoundly and profusely talented dramatist, essayist and poet’s recent comparison of President Trump to General Idi Amin Dada, the late Ugandan military dictator.

Indeed, as of this writing and press preparation, for instance, Yours Truly had gathered from the proverbial grapevine that at least 50 American Prisoners of War were in the custody of the purportedly “Completely Obliterated” Iranian Army. Now, has it not often been said that: “Truth Suppressed and Buried Alive, Has Always Had a Way or Rising Out from the Grave and the Casket of Lies and Half-Truths, Ultimately?”

By Kwame Okoampa-Ahoofe, Jr., PhD
Professor Emeritus, Department of English
SUNY-Nassau Community College
Garden City, New York
E-mail: okoampaahoofekwame@gmail.com

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