In an Oval Office meeting on January 11, 2018, then-President Donald Trump became frustrated with legislators when they proposed restoring protections for immigrants from Haiti, El Salvador, and African countries as part of a bipartisan immigration plan.
“Why are we having all these people from shithole countries come here?” Trump said, referring to African countries and Haiti. He then suggested that the United States should instead bring more people from predominantly white Christian countries like Norway.
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Trump and his J.D. Vance mini-me doubled and tripled-down on their vilification of Haitian immigrants in the town of Springfield, Ohio at the September 17 presidential debate with Kamala Harris, in which Trump trumpeted a blatantly false and dangerous conspiracy theory: “They’re eating the dogs. They’re eating the cats. They’re eating the pets of the people that live there,” he said.
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Debate moderators, journalists, and Springfield city officials have fact-checked Trump’s claims and found absolutely no truth to these allegations.
Asked by the moderators how he learned of this, Trump arrogantly declared, “I saw it on TV.”
Oh, so does he believe that the CBS Network program Ghosts is real, that other shows that depict zombies, werewolves, and dead “White Walkers” are fully alive and actual?
YouTube screenshot A White Walker from the fantasy series Game of Thrones. Does Trump think these are real?
Does Trump believe the depictions of 1955 in the Back to the Future series? Well, most likely Trump has based his entire campaign on that atomic era since his political goal is to Make America Christian White and Male-Dominated Again (MACWMDA).
Trump has taken his vilification and demonization of those he has constructed as “the other” from the old and worn fascist racist playbook just before that era.
Though I am not familiar with Hitler and the Nazis claiming that Jews ate vermin, they depicted the Jewish people as living in swarms and engaging in eating frenzies like rats.
On a usual day in Germany in 1940, Jewish people discovered upon waking that they had been changed in the public mind into filthy and diseased vermin, as represented by their government’s Nazi propaganda film Der ewige Jude (TheEternal Jew).
Presented as a factual documentary, this antisemitic film, directed by Fritz Hippler and narrated by German actor Harry Giese, was the idea of and produced by Joseph Goebbels, Reich Minister of Propaganda and Education.
The film included scenes of people in the Lodz and Warsaw ghettos with “typically stereotypical Jewish features” of large noses, bulbous cunning eyes, receding foreheads, and men with long dark bushy beards.
The Nazi’s purpose in producing and widely circulating The Eternal Jew was to frighten and turn the so-called “Aryan” German population even further against their Jewish neighbors.
The film depicts Jews as race polluters and as destroyers of German culture and economy. It falsely charged that 47% of robberies are conducted by Jews, and 98% of prostitutes were Jewish. Its narrator argues, “The Jews are only 1% of the population, but they know how to terrorize a great, tolerant nation by controlling finance, the arts, education, and the media.”
It portrays the Jews of Poland as corrupt, filthy, lazy, ugly, and perverse, as dangerous animals and an alien people bent on world domination by manipulating and coopting international systems of banking and commerce.
Trump’s argument that undocumented immigrants (“aliens”)–actually all immigrants from our southern border and from Africa—are “poisoning the blood of our country” continues his wanna-be strongman’s reverberations of failed fascist dictators.
“Where rats appear,” announced the narrator of Der ewige Jude, “they bring ruin by destroying mankind’s goods and foodstuffs. In this way, they spread disease, plague, leprosy, typhoid fever, cholera, dysentery, and so on. They are cunning, cowardly, and cruel and are found mostly in large packs. Among the animals, they represent the rudiment of an insidious, underground destruction—just like the Jews among human beings.”
Der ewige Jude ends with Adolph Hitler’s notorious speech to the German Parliament (Reichstag) on January 30, 1939.
“If international Jewish financiers inside and outside Europe should succeed in plunging the nations once more into a world war,” shouted the dictator, “then the result will not be the… victory of Jewry but the annihilation of the Jewish race in Europe.”
The film further intensified the harassment and violence directed against Jewish people in Germany and throughout the Nazi realm. Mobs continued to torch Jewish businesses and places of worship. They grabbed Jewish men on the street and forcefully cut or painfully plucked out their beards, scrawled graffiti on their structures, and engaged in other forms of public humiliation. The German “Aryans” had the safety to do so under direct government sanction.
A crucial point in the psychology of stereotyping and scapegoating is the representation of minoritized groups as, in historian John Boswell’s words, “animals bent on the destruction of the children of the majority.” Dominant groups have long alleged that Jews acted as dangerous predators of young people.
Since Trump and Vance have used their bull(shit) horns to advance and amplify their lies about legal Haitian immigrants, city schools and municipal buildings have been forced to close on two consecutive days due to bomb threats. In addition, several city officials and municipal employees have also been subjected to bomb threats.
Donald Trump, the perennial racist
Steven Hirsch/Pool via USA TODAY NETWORK May 30, 2024; New York, NY: Former President Donald Trump speaks to the press after being found guilty on 34 felony counts of falsifying business records court at Manhattan criminal court
From the time he first descended the golden escalator in Trump Tower to announce his presidential run in 2015, Trump continually demeaned, stereotyped, and scapegoated immigrants, especially Muslims and Latinx people.
He initially stated, “The U.S. has become a dumping ground for everyone else’s problems. [Mexico is] sending people that have lots of problems, and they are bringing those problems to us. They are bringing drugs, and bringing crime, and they’re rapists.”
Not soon after his election, Trump ordered children of undocumented immigrants taken from their parents and placed into dehumanizing and horrifying cages
After two of President Trump’s travel bans from majority-Muslim countries were struck down in the courts, on June 26, 2018 the Supreme Court approved Trump’s September 2017 travel ban into the U.S. from five majority-Muslim countries: Somalia, Iran, Libya, Yemen, and Syria (plus North Korea and senior government officials from Venezuela).
In the case of Trump, President of the United States, et al. v. Hawaii, et al., the Supreme Court ruled in a narrow 5-4 decision that “The [Trump] Proclamation is squarely within the scope of Presidential authority,” on national security grounds.
In a blistering dissent, Justice Sonia Sotomayor wrote, “The majority here completely sets aside the President’s charged statements about Muslims as irrelevant. That holding erodes the foundational principles of religious tolerance that the court elsewhere has so emphatically protected, and it tells members of minority religions in our country ‘that they are outsiders, not full members of the political community’”.
Trump eventually enlarged his dehumanizing representations to include all people of Latin America. In his January 19, 2019 White House speech on immigration, he continued attempting to depict people desperate for a better way of life for themselves and their families into deranged and dangerous rapists, gang members, human traffickers, and drug smugglers out to subvert good Americans (white people).
In his recent debate and on the campaign stump, he has repeated his main strategy of demonizing immigrants of color.
President Joe Biden and Vice President Kamala Harris are “letting millions of people from jails, from prisons, from insane asylums, from mental institutions, drug dealers pour in,” he said.
The facts, though, contradict Trump’s hateful descriptions of immigrants in his divide and conquer strategy to instill fear in his supporters.
A PNAS report that studied rates of crime in the U.S. claimed, “Contrary to public perception, we observe considerably lower felony arrest rates among undocumented immigrants compared to legal immigrants and native-born US citizens and find no evidence that undocumented criminality has increased in recent years.”
In addition, the Stanford Institute for Policy Research found that “the likelihood of an immigrant being incarcerated is 60% lower than of people born in the United States.”
In his current campaign to recapture the White House, Trump asserted that undocumented immigrants are “poisoning the blood of our country.”
Donald Trump, arguably the more prominent of the so-called “birthers,” continually accused President Barack Obama of illegitimacy as Commander in Chief by arguing that he was born outside the United States, even well after Obama released his official birth certificate.
This—along with Trump’s supposed investigations into Mr. Obama’s time spent in Indonesia as a child, and inquiries into his African roots on his father’s side—coexisted as not-so-veiled xenophobic and racist threats at the time.
Shutterstock Panorama view of New York city eith statue of liberty tomorrow morning at sunrise. View from Staten Island. Big art Panorama.
Rather than characterizing immigration and migration issues as humanitarian concerns, anti-immigration activists (like the aforementioned World War II European fascists) connect the narratives representing immigrants and migrants to concepts of disease, crime, drugs, alien and lower forms of culture and life, to invading hordes and barbarians at the gates who, if allowed to enter, will destroy the glorious civilization we have established among the lesser nations of the Earth.
On a more basic and personal level, the rhetoric of invasion at our borders taps into psychological fears, or more accurately, of terrors of infection: our country, our workplaces, and more basically, our private places in which “aliens” forcefully penetrate our personal spaces around our bodies, into our orifices, and down to the smallest cellular level.
Actually, immigrants are filling many of the gaps in the economy by working jobs that U.S. citizens do not want to fill. They are paying taxes, raising children, and most believe in the American Dream: that they can build better lives for themselves and their families.
They are not “poisoning the blood of our country,” as Trump stated—echoing Hitler and Mussolini. Instead, immigrants are risking their lives and spilling their blood to protect this country.
Rather than listening to and following the would-be dictator, let us, instead guided our beliefs and actions with the stirring words of Jewish immigrant and poet, Emma Lazarus, in her famous excerpt from her beautiful tribute to the immigrant, “The New Colossus,” on our majestic Statue of Liberty:
“Give me your tired, your poor, Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free, The wretched refuse of your teeming shore. Send these, the homeless, tempest-tost to me, I lift my lamp beside the golden door!”
