EDITORIAL – To Donald Trump: ‘Have you no sense of decency, sir?’

An editorial by Mel Rothenburger.

THERE’S A FAMOUS QUOTE that occasionally gets resurrected when people start losing hope. It’s attributed to a U.S. lawyer named Joseph N. Welch and it was directed to then Senator Joseph McCarthy in 1954 during a hearing in which McCarthy spuriously accused a member of Welch’s law firm of having Communist ties.

Welch responded: “Until this moment, Senator, I never really gauged your cruelty or your recklessness. Let us not assassinate this lad further, senator. You have done enough. Have you no sense of decency, sir? At long last, have you left no sense of decency?”

It was the “Have you no sense of decency” excerpt that has lived on. It’s being raised again in the context of what has happened in the U.S., especially during the past couple of days.

Renee Good, a 37-year-old mother of three, was shot and killed during an ICE operation in Minneapolis. ICE, of course, is the agency that has been so busy trying to track down undocumented immigrants.

Good was driving an SUV at the time and there are vastly different interpretations of what happened. If you’ve seen the video, you’ll understand why.

President Donald Trump’s immediate reaction to the woman’s tragic death was to initiate his administration’s narrative of blaming the victim, claiming she was “very disorderly, obstructing and resisting, who then violently ran over the ICE Officer.”

No message of condolence to Good’s family. No assurance that a full investigation would be held to assess what went wrong. No plea for calm. Just inflammatory rhetoric and victim shaming.

Video clearly shows his claim about running over the officer was false, but it set the tone for members of his administration and others of his political ilk to paint the woman as some sort of terrorist.

Vice President J.D. Vance suggested she was part of a left-wing “network.”  Homeland security secretary Kristi Noem said the woman was engaged in “an act of domestic terrorism.” And on it has gone.

The opposing point of view, largely from Democrats, angrily disputes that version of events but those with the most power have already passed judgment and created a “truth” that suits their purposes.

The dramatically different accounts illustrate the current dangerous divisions within American society as a whole. Trump has a major role to play in that.

Let’s not forget Trump’s cruel comments after the deaths of film actor and director Rob Reiner and his wife, and using the death from leukemia of Tatiana Schiloberg, the granddaughter of John F. Kennedy, to attack the Kennedy family.

Again, “Have you no sense of decency, sir?”

Mel Rothenburger is a former regular contributor to CFJC-TV and CBC radio, publishes the ArmchairMayor.ca opinion website, and is a recipient of the Jack Webster Foundation Lifetime Achievement Award, and a Webster Foundation Commentator of the Year finalist. He has served as mayor of Kamloops, school board chair and TNRD director, and is a retired daily newspaper editor.  He can be reached at mrothenburger@armchairmayor.ca.