nustabet gaming Hegseth confirmed as Trump’s defense secretary: White affirmative action
Pete Hegseth speaks after being sworn in as Secretary of Defense by Vice President JD Vance in the Indian Treaty Room of the Eisenhower Executive Office Building on the White House campus in Washington, Saturday, Jan. 25, 2025. (AP Photo/Rod Lamkey, Jr.)
Make no mistake, affirmative action is not dead. Trump declared it to be last week. But as per usual, he was lying.
When the US Senate confirmed the oft-inebriated Pete Hegseth, whose own mother declared him an abusive womanizer, and for whom there was ample evidence that as a former head of some small veterans nonprofits, he was supremely unqualified, it all just didn’t matter.
We now have the least qualified person to lead the Department of Defense, the largest and most demanding of our government’s bureaucracies.
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Hegseth had one thing going for him.
He was white. And he was Trump-like, which pleases the most important person in the nation.
When 47, Trump, first saw the former FOX weekend host, it was like he saw his own image, someone with the skill to filibuster and bully the media. That’s the job, after all. Not governing. Not budgeting. Not being expert on defense matters.
ADVERTISEMENTIn addition, just like Trump, Hegseth showed an adeptness in handling salacious claims to match the Trumpster’s Hall of Shame that includes Stormy Daniels and E. Jean Carrol.
Did Hegseth know to get a non-disclosure from a woman? Of course.
He did all the critical things that say in Trump’s mind you are “qualified” to be in Trump’s pocket, er, His cabinet.
ADVERTISEMENTIn December, even JD Vance had his doubts. “Pete isn’t 100 percent dead. But he might be 90 percent dead,” Vance said after the police report of Hegseth’s dalliance at a Monterey, Calif. hotel emerged, among other personal shortcomings, according to Axios.
But like Trump, Hegseth didn’t give up. And survived. It was a 50-50 vote. Some Republicans had a spine. But not enough to rival homo erectus.
Remember how people cheered when Trump heralded in his inaugural address that America was now a meritocracy.
Hegseth meritorious? Only when the standard is so low, but how long can it go when it is set by a president convicted of 34 felonies.
It’s a standard that calls for a redefinition of American exceptionalism. The freest country bound by the Constitution, so different from the rest of the world?
Not really.
No, “exceptionalism” now means we make exceptions for friends of Trump.
Compromised. White. And beholden to him.
White affirmative action.
When Trump asked former Pentagon Secretary Mark Esper to shoot Black Lives Matter protestors in the legs, Esper revealed in his memoir, “Sacred Oath,” his answer.
Esper said no.
Trump’s Hegseth would say yes.
Why McKinley matters
The most significant Trump moment for Filipino Asian Americans at the Inaugural may have been when 47 first mentioned Denali in Alaska – the highest peak in the nation, renamed by President Obama – would get a sex change.
It had been just a massive hill, a big white mountain peak, the largest in North America. But it was named Mt. McKinley when a New York writer, impressed by then Republican candidate William McKinley, transformed the mountain into a big white male.
Kind of made sense.
The US bought Alaska from Russia in 1867 for $7.2 million. It was all about American expansion. (Sound like someone’s hankering for Greenland?) McKinley was our imperial president whose expansion vision included the Philippines as the first US colony.
Obama’s renaming of the peak in 2015 was not political correctness, but simply the recognition that a rock is a rock. And so he named it after the Alaskan Athabascan people’s word meaning “The Great One.”
It could be a woman.
And so when Trump reclaimed the name of the big white rock, you know he saw himself first, but that would be too “ME, ME, ME.”
His meme crypto coin launch last week was me-me-me enough for now. His $Trump coin in less than a week was worth tens of BILLIONS of dollars, a coin with no underlying value except for what people are willing throw at it. So far, it had been up to $56 billion. He can afford a little humility in the first week.
McKinley was great, in Trump’s view, but not greater than him. Trump, after all survived an assassination attempt. Not McKinley.
Also, Trump doesn’t want to be just the tallest peak in North America, he wants to remake all of America in his image.
That’s why after week one the subtext of McKinley is important. He’s the backwards milestone.
Military assisted deportations, birthright citizenship challenge, it all sends the country back in time.
McKinley Club memory and birthright citizenship
Preliminary data from the Philippine Statistics Authority (PSA) showed the trade-in-goods balance — the difference between exports and imports — amounted to a $4.38 billion deficit in August, narrowing from the $4.89-billion shortfall recorded in the previous month. However, this was still higher compared to the $4.11 deficit in August 2023.
In an interview with Bagong Pilipinas Ngayon on Tuesday, DTI Undersecretary Allan Gepty said the market share of fresh bananas in South Korea dropped to 65 percent in 2023 from a high of 98 percent in 2013.
Years ago, I once sat under McKinley’s portrait at a private club in Ohio. I didn’t realize until later, I should have been vomiting my lunch.
McKinley was the man who colonized my father, and all the Filipinos after the Spanish American War.
mwgames188 comIf you wondered how far back we are going as Trump drives his cybertruck in reverse, it’s like a wrong way “Back to the Future.” It’s back to the past. And McKinley was the north star, at least back to 1898, when Filipinos were seen as colonial toys and few were allowed in America.
McKinley was Trump’s soft introduction in his inaugural address to his true intentions. He didn’t mention birthright citizenship until much later in the day.
But to undo the Constitution is a bold move and it would reverse an Asian American pillar in our Constitution’s 14th Amendment, the Wong Kim Ark decision.
I’ve written so many times about Wong Kim Ark since conservatives started barking about birthright citizenship in the 1990s. But now everyone should be aware of the issue and the Asian American born in San Francisco to Chinese parents in the 1890s.
Wong’s saga begins when his non-citizen parents went back to China, and he subsequently went to visit. Upon returning he was barred from re-entry. He had to fight to the Supreme Court in a case that affirmed the 14th Amendment’s birthright citizenship to those born on American soil.
That was in 1898, and it’s been law ever since. But now Trump defiantly says no.
Because he can.
It’s make work noise and already one judge has called the attempt “blatantly unconstitutional.”
But Trump’s just setting the tone for 2025 and beyond.
Think of the forces that said no back in 1898 to birthright citizenship. They were the same Americans who didn’t like anyone of color in our country. Mexicans weren’t the key targets back then. It was Asians, specifically the Chinese, the hatred for whom inspired the first Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882, the first time an ethnic group was singled out that way in America.
The history subtext is overwhelming. Trump is sending America in reverse, to the days of McKinley, when people of color didn’t measure up to the big white peak.
Add Hegseth’s approval, and make no mistake, after week one Trump has us hurtling backwards toward a country where white was supreme.
That’s not 2025, but it’s why Trump yearns for the 1890s. That’s how far back we’re going in Trump’s time machine.
Emil Guillermo is an award-winning journalist and commentator. He writes for the Inquirer.net’s US Channel. He has written a weekly “Amok” column on Asian American issues since 1995.
Watch his micro-talk show “Emil Amok’s Takeout/What Does an Asian American Think?” on www.YouTube.com/emilamok1 Or join him on http://www.patreon.com/emilamok
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