Taking King Trump’s Shilling

With St. Patrick’s Day marching our way, it is a good time to remember that being Irish is more than getting projectile-vomit drunk and wearing green derbies.

The “wearin o’ the green” is to memorialize soldiers of revolution, martyrs of the gallows, victims of religious sectarianism, the graves of the Great Hunger, and the sacrifices of hunger strikers like Bobby Sands.

You cannot support the eight centuries of bigotry, oppression, and struggle the Irish have endured to gain their independence, religious freedom, and civil rights and still support an autocrat like Donald Trump who would have supported King George over George Washington in 1776.

Any of the Irish who have worked for or with Donald Trump are a disgrace to their heritage, which has been a long and bloody march against bigotry in all its ugly forms.

But look at the parade of what my father called “Castle Irishmen” who have worked with or for this blatant bigot named Donald Trump since he was elected president.

Start at the top.

U.S. Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell has supported every racist, bigoted, and anti-democratic Tweet and racist smear made by Trump, including his anti-Mexican rants when he announced his candidacy, the Muslim ban, the caging of children at our Southern border, and his campaign to build an idiotic wall for which Mexico will never pay one peso.

Bootlicker McConnell has even supported Trump’s so-called “National Emergency” to finance the same wall for which the United States Congress has denied him funding.

For turning his back on his own oppressed heritage, this March 17 Bootlicker McConnell wins the 2019 Gypo Nolan Award — named for the quisling in “The Informer.”

Former House of Representatives Speaker Paul Ryan is another man of Hibernian extraction who would have donned a Red Coat after the Boston Tea Party. Here’s a sneering ingrate who willfully forgets where he comes from; raised on food stamps, he toiled tirelessly to kill Obamacare for the poor. Ryan resigned from Congress not because of Trump’s bigotry but only after he helped carry Trump’s swamp water for the only thing green he ever cared about — money. Ryan whipped the Congressional vote for Trump’s $1.5 trillion tax cut for the rich, paid for by working stiffs, many of whom make up 44 million-strong Irish America. Ryan took King Trump’s Shilling and ran.

In Belfast, during The Troubles, men like him often spent their blood money on new kneecaps.

Then you have this Kelly Anne Conway, nee Fitzpatrick, head of Trump’s White House communications, aka Chief BS Artist, who would have spun The Great Hunger as The Art of the No-Meal.

Then there’s White House Chief of Staff Mick Mulvaney, who as former head of the Office of Management and Budget, helped orchestrate the tax cut for the rich but who opposes a national minimum wage.

And let’s not forget Mike Pence, a grown man who calls his wife “Mother,” a devout and pious Christian who smiles at his vulgar boss’s bigotry, trailing behind Trump like the guy in the circus with the broom and the shovel following the elephants.

Ha’penny Pence is a two-faced Tory, that Irishman who waves the Union Jack from the His Lord’s Castle Keep on St. Patrick’s Day.

Here on Long Island we have Congressman Pete King, who was once so good on the civil rights and the peace talks in Northern Ireland, a great champion of the Irish Diaspora. But now Pete King turns the other rosy cheek when Trump treats brown skinned immigrants from south of the border like “invaders.” King railed against the way Britain treated Irish prisoners in Long Kesh prison but we hear nothing from him about thousands of Hispanic kids separated from their parents, lost in the treacherous ICE and HHS system, many of them abused and forever divided from their families. This is shameful. If those kids were from the Bogside in Derry or the Falls Road in Belfast, Pete King would be waving a Tricolor on every network and cable program in an angry rant at Trump’s tyranny.

Last time I heard Pete King interviewed, he was bragging about getting his picture taken with Donald Trump.

This is like smiling for a picture with the late and hated Ian Paisley, Pete. Trump is an even worse bigot than Paisley, racist head of the Unionist Party in Northern Ireland. Grow a pair of potatoes, Pete. Be a man, be an Irishman on March 17 and burn that photo of you and Trump, who stands against everything that is the Irish heritage which has been a never-ending battle for freedom, equality, and civil rights.

Watching Trump last week exonerate Kim Jong-un of the torture and murder of American college student Otto Warmbier in North Korea, you could see the face of John Bull at his tyrannical worst. Jong-un murdered his own half-brother and uncle, and starves his own people the way Mother England’s Sir Charles Trevelyan orchestrated the genocidal starvation of the Irish during the potato blight of 1847. This is the kind of monster Donald Trump says he “loves.”

If you work for Trump, or with him, you are supporting all the autocrats and mass murderers he glorifies.

Any Irisher who could take a paycheck from Trump after watching him genuflect to the murderous Putin in Helsinki and offer alibis for Mohammad Bin Salman, who ordered the ice-blooded murder of Washington Post columnist Jamal Khashoggi, has surrendered his soul.

Trump’s celebration of tyrants, bullies, strongmen, autocrats, and murderers tells you that if Trump ever heard of him, he would have been a big fan of Oliver Cromwell who sold the Irish he didn’t kill into indentured servitude.

And let us not forget Donald Trump’s Irish media clowns, pathetic Tin Pan Alley Stage Irishmen like Sean Hannity, another Long Islander, who does a little fawning jig for his imperial boss every time he interviewers Trump.

Every one of these Irish-Americans who took King Trump’s Shilling will wear the shame of their obsequiousness for the rest of their lives.

Remember every one of them when they wear green and try to say they are proud sons and daughters of Erin on March 17.

They stand with a man who is the antithesis of what it is to be Irish.

denishamill@gmail.com