This is an adapted excerpt from the Aug. 31 episode of “The Rachel Maddow Show.”
I took piano lessons when I was a kid. I was terrible (my hands don’t work great), but I was OK at reading music. I treated it like a puzzle. On a treble clef, there are five lines for five different notes, EGBDF, or “Every Good Boy Does Fine.” On a bass clef, there are also five lines for five different notes, GBDFA, or “Good Bikes Don’t Fall Apart.”
Those are called mnemonic devices, and they help you remember information by using the first letters of a list of words to make another word, one that’s easier to remember. One of the most famous examples is for the Great Lakes, “HOMES,” which refers to Lake Huron, Lake Ontario, Lake Michigan, Lake Erie and Lake Superior.
Now, I’m not the first to point this out, but if Donald Trump is really going to insist on calling Lake Ontario “Lake America,” well, that means the HOMES acronym will no longer work in the United States. So if you’re going to build yourself a mnemonic for remembering the Trump version of the Great Lakes, it can’t be HOMES. If you drop the “O” and add the “A,” it will have to be “SHAME.”
And that seems about right. The best mnemonic devices operate at a couple different levels, and “SHAME” is a really handy one for thinking about this time in the Trump era of U.S. governance. Whether or not you voted for him, or you liked him once, or you never voted for him and never liked him, what he’s doing now, in office, falls pretty clearly into the category of just shameful behavior.
Take, for example, the Trump administration contract flight that took off from Texas on Friday night. The New York Times reported that the flight took about 70 shackled and chained people from the United States to the Central African Republic, a country that is currently going through a civil war and one for which the State Department advises that any American traveling there should have their DNA sampled and put on file before their trip so their body can be identified if and when they turn up dead in this war-torn violent place.
None of the people on that flight had any ties to the Central African Republic, and we don’t know that any of those people had any criminal history whatsoever. Nor do we believe any of them consented to be brought to that country.
But we do know that about 10 of the people on that flight were from Afghanistan. That includes a 24-year-old man named Khalil who had been in the United States specifically and explicitly because his family helped the U.S. military in Afghanistan during our war there. The military promised that, in return, the U.S. would protect them and keep them safe from reprisals by the Taliban. Khalil’s family was, in fact, threatened by the Taliban because of their work for the U.S. military, and so they were given legal permission to be in the United States. But Trump decided to honor that sacred commitment by flying him shackled to the Central African Republic.
According to CNN, others who have been sent there have reportedly been told that they only have three months’ permission to stay in that country, and then they’ll have to be deported somewhere else — which, presumably, could mean back to their country of origin. In Khalil’s case, that means back to the Taliban, from whom we, as a nation, explicitly promised to protect him.
Ryan Goodman at Just Security posted a remarkable video statement from Zach Schmidt, an active-duty U.S. Marine colonel who spoke, out of uniform and in his private capacity, to ask for help for Khalil. Schmidt said he was deployed in 2009 as a military adviser to the Afghan National Army, where he worked with Khalil’s older brother.
“I know the risks he took to help the United States. I owe it to Khalil’s brother and their family to help share this story and advocate for Khalil’s asylum in the U.S.,” he said. “Simply put, I want to help the United States honor its commitments to the Afghan civilians and their families who helped U.S. forces for so many years.”
In addition to the Afghans aboard that flight, The New York Times reported that some of the other people on the plane were from Iran.
When Trump started a war with that country, he told its people they should rise up against their own government and the U.S. would back them. On Monday, he was still crowing online about how terrible the Iranian government is to their own people, particularly those who have protested against the regime.
But, while Trump is proclaiming how much he supports the Iranian people and how terrible the Iranian regime is, newly released emails as part of a lawsuit from the National Iranian American Council show his administration had apparently been working with the Iranian government on deportation lists.
So people came to the U.S. saying they had to flee Iran because the government there was coming for them; then, according to these emails, the Trump administration went back to the Iranian government and offered them information on those who had fled, letting Iran pick which of those people it wanted to force back to them.
There is a word for this, which is also a mnemonic for Trump’s humiliating unilateral renaming of the Great Lakes: shame.
Allison Dretzel contributed.
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