Donald Trump: Purveyor of Hate
Donald Trump would halt all immigration if our economy wasn't so dependent on it. He's demonized all immigrants from non white nations.
Hate and fear mongering toward immigrants is on the rise in the United States and in many Western European nations where far right political parties are gaining a footing. The old tribal “us versus them” mentality reared it’s ugly head with the influx of immigrants from the Middle East in the case of Europe and with migrants from Central, South America and Haiti in the case of the US. Unfortunately, the irrational fear and mistrust of immigrants is as old as humankind.
This is the face of Forced Deportation in words and pictures from a 2021 New York Times Article. Both Trump and Project 2025 see this as a major part of the GOP Platform.
Our own history is stained with periods of fear and mistrust toward immigrants from the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882 that barred any additional Chinese immigrants from entering the US, to Operation Wetback in the early 1950s where 1.5 million illegal Mexican immigrant farmworkers were deported due to an erroneous fear of jobs being taken. Donald Trump referenced the deportation of Mexicans during his first debate with Joe Biden. Chinese immigrants were banned to protect the “Good Order” of localities. The Exclusion Act was finally repealed in 1943. Those deported during Operation Wetback were temporary workers, not full time residents.
Trumpism: Fear & Hatred from the top
It’s barely been a generation since the United States openly supported the deportation of an entire class of people or tried to ban their entry into the US. Trump’s Muslim ban, by Executive Order, was fought in the courts, but eventually upheld by the Supreme Court. Only through Biden’s repeal of Trump’s order and through other court actions, was the government able to reverse this anti immigrant movement. Unfortunately, the underbelly of hate, that once existed only in darkened rooms, is once again a major campaign issue in 2024 in the form of Project 2025 and Trump’s pledge to round up and deport as many as 20 million undocumented immigrants.
Hate did not start with Donald Trump’s attacks on immigrants, building the wall, the vilification of all Democrats as Fascists, Communists and worse and his misogynistic views on women. It certainly won’t end once he is defeated, as he has opened wide, the door that was ever so close to being closed.
Again, it’s not that hate, racism and tribalism had disappeared before Trump. It’s more that his vile rhetoric, unfortunately rung true with much of rural America, mostly white non college voters, where these negative feelings toward immigrants continue to exist. See figure 1
Fig 1. 2020 Presidential Election by County or 47 percent of the electorate.
Trump’s MAGA right wing is comprised of many fringe groups, from the Proud Boys, to the White Nationalists, the far right Evangelicals, racist luminaries like Charlie Kirk, Nick Fuentes and Alex Jones. He’s never denounced any of them. He’ll denounce violence, but never that word and these groups in the same sentence. Whether the subject is Charlottesville or the attack on the Capitol, Trump will only condemn violence in general terms and not the participants.
Trump is absolutely aware that millions of his voters subscribe to a draconian view and response to the perceived threat of immigrants as, in Trump’s words, “Poisoning the blood of our nation”. Should he suddenly become a compassionate conservative, he’d lose those voters. Whether Trump is actually a racist has never been clear, but he certainly courts them as if he is.
Trump was recently interviewed on Full Measure by Sharyl Atkinson. He went full MAGA with the same repugnant lies about immigrants saying, they are criminals, mental patients, murderers, that the Central and South American nations are emptying their prisons and mental institutions and sending these people to the US.
While numerous sources have disproven his claims, it doesn’t matter. His words are music to the ears of the MAGA faithful. They cheer like the “Mob” in ancient Rome cheered the Gladiators in fights to the death. Trump knows the first rule of propaganda. Say it loud and say it often. Trump stokes fear like the Pope gives Homilies.
Trump’s most recent attack on Haitian immigrants, cheered on by his VP candidate, J.D. Vance, accusing them of eating cats and dogs appeals to the
Donald Trump speaks in cold-as-ice terms as he discusses rounding up 20 million people, women, children, many born here, putting them on buses, sending them to camps, and finally deporting them to the nation of their birth. This would be far worse than what we did in WWII with the Japanese and would be comparable to an “Ethnic Cleansing” of the United States or ridding us of those who would in his own words, poison our blood. It’s unthinkable and something even Hollywood could not imagine.
We’ve been fortunate that a man like Trump only comes along once in a century. It might come as a surprise, but he’s not the first of his kind to have ever occupied the Oval Office. Andrew Johnson set our nation back years with his reversals of Abraham Lincoln’s anti slavery legacy. While not technically immigrants, after the Civil War, Southern blacks were, in fact, moving around the nation, heading west, but mainly north. They were internal immigrants suffering the same mistrust, fear and hatred by a defeated South and across the nation.
During the years immediately following the Civil War, President Andrew Johnson clashed repeatedly with the Republican-controlled Congress over reconstruction of the defeated South. Johnson vetoed legislation that Congress passed to protect the rights of those who had been freed from slavery. This clash culminated in the House of Representatives voting, on February 24, 1868, to impeach the president. On March 5, the trial began in the Senate, where Republicans held more seats than the two-thirds majority required to remove Johnson from office. When the trial concluded on May 16, however, the president had won acquittal, not because a majority of senators supported his policies but because a sufficient minority wished to protect the office of the president and preserve the constitutional balance of powers.
Does this excerpt, taken from the Senate.gov website, sound familiar? Anyone else we know that fits this description?
Trump’s legacy will have been to gut the GOP of it’s proud heritage with the purging of all non believers. He’s divided our nation to the point where people actually fear a new Civil War. He’s demonized anyone who is black or brown, all without merit on a platform of fear and fabricated stories. His running mate, J.D. Vance admitted as much in an interview with CNN’s Dana Bash.
Why Does MAGA fear immigrants?
Our nation’s long history of state sponsored racism has been minimized, but never fully expunged. Immigrants have been vilified over and over again from the Chinese, to Southern Europeans, Irish, Germans, Muslims and now Central Americans and Haitians. With each wave of migrants, comes the same deep seeded fears of change, assimilation, mistrust and the unknown. This mistrust and fear often breeds hate.
If fear breeds hate then what is it that we fear from others or those who are different in language, skin color, religion, dress, traditions and even food choice? Why do we fear these basic differences? Is it misplaced or has something substantive taken place to drive this fear and hatred? 9/11 was a perfect example of an event with a specific group of people involved, specifically young Saudi men, Muslim men.
The stories of Muslims and even Sikhs from India being attacked after 9/11, due to guilt by association, are too numerous to mention. An entire community feared for their own lives after a tiny minority committed such a heinous act. How soon the native born Americans forgot about Timothy McVeigh’s bombing of the Murrah federal building in Oklahoma five years before 9/11. He was down home white boy as was his partner, but there were no calls to throw whites out of the country.
Assimilation & Acceptance
One study by Stanford looked at assimilation as the main source of fear, with native born Americans worrying about immigrants setting themselves apart as cultural islands in our midst.
There are those who fear a Taco stand on a street where none existed before. Some fear the sound of a new language in their neighborhood. Others fear the sight of a headdress on a woman or a yamaka on a man’s head. They ask themselves, “What do these people want and why are they here? They don’t even speak English!”
It’s always the same answer that immigrants come to America in droves because they want what we have. They don’t want to take it from us, but simply want a chance to participate in the American Dream. One reason they come is the open door we’ve always presented to the world symbolized by the plaque on the Statue of Liberty. “Give me your tired, your poor, your huddled masses yearning to breathe free.” Nothing has really changed over the years. It’s simply a matter of timing as each generation sees immigration as a new threat.
My family came to America from Germany in 1872 to escape a brutal government. My next door neighbor moved from Venezuela last month for the same reason. How is he any less welcome?
The fundamentals of racism and prejudice boil down to some basics. We are taught from birth, who to like and who to dislike. We grow up experiencing our parent's words and deeds, learning about life through their associations, church, music, clubs, friends, and co workers. The food we grew up with ends up being the food we like later in life and that which we feel most comfortable as we sit down to breakfast, lunch and dinner. We tend to replicate our formative years throughout the rest of our lives as we make friends, take jobs and move into certain neighborhoods. It’s simple familiarity.
Do we as humans or as members of the American culture have an innate fear or resistance to a change in our surroundings, associations, etc? Are we hesitant to embrace change in general as a species? Is basic prejudice more than that which is imparted to us by our parents and core associations early in life? Why has "difference", whether it be skin color, religion, ethnicity or culture become synonymous with something negative?
If a German Shepherd bit me as a 5 year old I might end up being fearful of all German Shepherds, but is that logical? It might be for a little immature child making an uninformed subconscious correlation or causal conclusion, but it’s not logical to a mature adult. Individual dogs, regardless of breed, are different from each other. The same can be said for people. In a large sample size with 10,000 people, some, a tiny percent, might end up being serial killers while another small percent might go on to be our greatest philanthropists, thinkers and leaders. Take any similar sample size, the world over, and the results will be the same. Every population sits on a bell curve.
It all comes down to labeling
Prejudice seems to rear it's ugly head when we begin to classify people by their differences and then wrongly place assumptions on those superficial characteristics. We, as a society, love to classify and file people into folders by race, religion, ethnicity and socioeconomic status. We lump people together in groups by these qualities and characteristics. We then falsely extrapolate negative monikers based on nothing more than a single event or the actions of one person from the group. “He’s a Muslim Terrorist!” Yes, he is Muslim and yes he is a terrorist, but are all Muslims terrorists? Unfortunately, many in our society come to this conclusion. Correlation is not causation as can be seen in the “Ice Cream Sales vs Shark Attacks” Chart.
We’ve seen this with the tragic deaths of a few native born Americans who’ve been the victim of a crime by a person who happened to be an immigrant. The right wing media and politicians turn these anecdotal and tragic events into a so called, “Immigrant Crime Wave”. Laken Riley, a young girl, was tragically killed by a man who happened to be an immigrant. Fox News, Trump and his GOP sycophants ran with the story as if it was a common occurrence and yet, study after study has shown crimes committed by immigrants to be less than that of home grown American citizens. The GOP led House even passed H.R.7511 - Laken Riley Act to amplify this tragedy for political gain.
As Trump discusses immigrant deportation in the interview referenced earlier with Sharyl Atkinson, he voices his concerns that the so called Main Steam media or the “Radical Left Lunatics” as he says, will dare to take a single incident of the wrong person being deported and blow it up into a Breaking News Story.
The despicable hypocrisy of his example is exactly what Fox News and MAGA politicians do on a daily basis, taking any crime committed by an immigrant and turning it into a massive immigrant crime wave that is destroying our cities.
A Continued Fear of Change
How we grew up determines who we are. Cultural traditions, religious beliefs, the foods we eat, and how we dress all contribute to defining our adult lives. These traditions and beliefs while normal for some might be seen as strange to others with a different upbringing.
Do we have an innate fear of these differences or are we taught to fear, dislike or mistrust that which might seem strange or foreign to our own upbringing? People in the Midwest eat calf brains and eggs. That might seem strange to someone from the east coast of the US. Those on the east coast pick crabs on brown paper and eat raw oysters. The Midwesterner might find this strange and uncomfortable to watch or participate.
There are cultural and religious norms around the world that conflict with each other from continent to continent, country to country and from tribe to tribe. Wars have been and continue to be fought over these differences. People are killed every day for how they think, pray, dress and even love. To the outsider this seems nonsensical, but to those in the middle, they'll tout genuine concerns and grievances as to why a family should be feared and driven out of a neighborhood because of their beliefs. These prejudices are not always this overt, but can be subtle in nature and almost invisible.
So Why Do We Hate?
On a personal level, aside from a specific event or tragedy that might impact my own life, I don’t really hate anyone. As long as you don’t kick my dog, hurt my wife or children, or burn down my house, I don’t really have a legitimate reason to hate someone. I don’t hate all Muslims because of 9/11. My father didn’t hate all Japanese after Pearl Harbor. To do so would make no sense.
There are those, however, in positions of authority, who are stoking fears of those who are different. They are whipping up false rumors and accusations, singling out specific groups of mainly brown and black immigrants.
Playing devils advocate for a moment, imagine a low consumer of news and current events who goes to a political rally and hears a former president and other politicians as well as some media outlets, repeatedly speaking of immigrants raping women, kidnapping children, bringing in drugs, murdering citizens and taking over apartment complexes, taking jobs or even eating pets. Imagine that same person being fed only this information from their echo chamber and circle of friends.
It’s hard to blame the people who actually believe these stories as we’ve mostly been taught to trust our elected officials and the free press, but politicians are no longer bound by facts and data and we no longer have only the big three networks with trusted anchors. The internet provides, through advanced algorithms, exactly what we want to see and hear. Accidently click on or like a video of a woman yodeling, as I did on TikTok the other day and your feed will give the impression that everyone yodels.
You’re a thieving, hideous looking, illiberal imbecile, donald. YOU, Mista—belong in either Leavenworth or GITMO forever more.
We've always loathed immigrants who were not white Anglo-Saxons.
"No Irish Need Apply."
"No Hebrews or Consumptives Taken."
"Guests taken to church free of charge." -- That was in resort hotels, to send the message with subtlety.