Donald Trump speaks to supporters during a rally at the Dayton International Airport on March 16, 2024, in Vandalia, Ohio.
Say this for Donald Trump: More and more, he’s dispensing with not-so-subtle dog whistles and getting right to the unabashed bigotry of his anti-immigrant message.
Say this for him, too: Once again he has the nation talking more about his latest outrages and less about his and his party’s obstruction of even bipartisan solutions to the very problems they decry.
There was Mr. Trump, the presumptive Republican nominee for president against Democrat Joe Biden, at a rally last Saturday, talking about immigrants in language that was no longer merely dehumanizing; it openly denied their humanity altogether.
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He claimed that young people coming across the border were criminals from prisons that other countries were emptying to save money. He added: “I don’t know if you call them ‘people,’ in some cases, they’re not people, in my opinion.” He later referred to them as “animals,” a term he has used over the years for various people of color.
This same rally, by the way, opened with an announcer telling the crowd, “Please rise for the horribly and unfairly treated January 6 hostages” – that is, the more than 1,250 people who have been quite fairly prosecuted and convicted for attacking the U.S. Capitol to try to help Mr. Trump overturn the 2020 election. It also featured Mr. Trump declaring that the nation would see “a bloodbath” if he isn’t elected this fall.
As is all too typical of the candidate whose fans insist he “tells it like it is,” Mr. Trump tried to walk some of his incendiary material back. The “bloodbath,” he insisted, referred only to the automotive industry, even though he stated that if he wasn’t reelected, the problems in the automotive industry would “be the least of it” and that the “bloodbath” would be for the “whole” country. It was not the first time he has threatened political violence, and it’s worth noting that it came in the same speech in which he lauded those who staged a violent insurrection on his behalf.
He didn’t backtrack on the dehumanizing language about immigrants, just as he hasn’t apologized for stating that immigrants are “poisoning the blood of our country” – rhetoric that echoes Adolf Hitler’s “contamination of the blood” writings about Jews. He denies knowing Hitler said that.
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It’s easy to get lost in the outrages, the gaslighting, and the absurdity that this is the candidate a major American political party presents as presidential material – and overlook that Mr. Trump, and Republicans in Congress, have made sure Congress does nothing to fix the U.S. immigration system.
Witness the recent failure of a bipartisan deal negotiated in the Senate, as part of a broader national security bill, that would have allowed President Biden to address the crush of immigrants particularly at the southwestern border more effectively. There were billions more for border agents, judges and technology in a bill that was less comprehensive than we have long urged but that certainly addressed many GOP demands, including that the government address illegal crossings and an apparently overused asylum system. But Mr. Trump put out the word to kill the deal, and it evaporated. So did aid to Israel and Ukraine. All problems, we note, that Mr. Trump says never would have happened if he was president, or that he can promptly fix if he’s elected.
Americans trying to make sense of this in 2024 need only look to what happened with another complex issue – health care – after they handed Mr. Trump and Republicans the White House and complete control of Congress for the first two years of his presidency. After years of Republicans campaigning to “repeal and replace” Obamacare, after Mr. Trump’s promises that he had a plan ready to pass if only he was elected, they came up with nothing.
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And so it will be if America falls for this again, with immigration, as Mr. Trump and his allies stoke the fire even as they campaign on an empty promise to put out.
Editorial: A new level of hate
10
7
24.03.2024
Donald Trump speaks to supporters during a rally at the Dayton International Airport on March 16, 2024, in Vandalia, Ohio.
Say this for Donald Trump: More and more, he’s dispensing with not-so-subtle dog whistles and getting right to the unabashed bigotry of his anti-immigrant message.
Say this for him, too: Once again he has the nation talking more about his latest outrages and less about his and his party’s obstruction of even bipartisan solutions to the very problems they decry.
There was Mr. Trump, the presumptive Republican nominee for president against Democrat Joe Biden, at a rally last Saturday, talking about immigrants in language that was no longer merely dehumanizing; it openly denied their humanity altogether.
Advertisement
Article continues below this ad
He claimed that young people coming across the border were criminals from prisons that other countries were emptying to save money. He added: “I don’t know if you call them ‘people,’ in some cases, they’re not people, in my opinion.” He later referred to them........
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