The First U.S. General to Call Trump a Bigot
The gnawing in retired Army Lieutenant General Ricardo Sanchez’s gut began in June 2015, when Donald Trump rode a golden escalator to the basement of Trump Tower and announced his candidacy for president. In his impromptu speech, Trump likened Mexican immigrants to a plague. “They’re bringing drugs. They’re bringing crime. They’re rapists. And some, I assume,” the candidate offered almost as an afterthought, “are good people.”
“I immediately flashed back to my first battalion commander telling me I was not good enough to compete with West Pointers because of who I was and where I came from,” says Sanchez, a Mexican American raised poor in south Texas, and who ultimately would serve as commander of all coalition ground forces in Iraq.
Over the next five years, as Trump made the transition from Republican nominee to president, Sanchez’s disgust at Trump’s actions only grew. There was Trump’s attack on Muslim Gold Star parents. His contention that a judge presiding over a lawsuit against him could not be impartial because the judge was Hispanic. His travel ban on Muslims. His refusal to condemn white supremacists following racial violence in Charlottesville, Virginia. His separating Latino families at the southern border, and his efforts to rescind the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals program and deport so-called Dreamers. His Cinco de Mayo celebration involving a photograph of himself eating a taco bowl, grinning.
Through all of this, Sanchez held his fire. Then came June 1 of this year. Demonstrators gathered peacefully on Lafayette Square outside the White House to protest the police killing of a black man in Minneapolis, George Floyd, were driven off by federal authorities wielding batons and pepper spray so that Trump, a self-proclaimed “law-and-order president,” could pose for pictures outside a nearby church while clutching a Bible.
For Sanchez, 69, it was the last straw. He had to speak out.
“I believe the president is a racist,” he told me. “The statement has to be made.”
https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2020/06/ricardo-sanchez-general-racism-military-trump/613279/?scrolla=5eb6d68b7fedc32c19ef33b4
