Trump's horrifying remarks laid bare his darkest instincts
As the 250th anniversary of the Declaration of Independence nears, President Donald Trump’s escalating attacks on immigrants of color have made his administration the most globally racist, hostile administration for non-white immigrants in U.S. history, on top of its aggressively implemented racist policies in the U.S. and around the world.
In the past two weeks alone, we’ve witnessed Trump’s racist rants against the Somali community in Minnesota, the freezing of all non-white asylum bids, and denial of citizenship rights for long-time legal immigrants from non-white majority nations. These come on top of the increasingly violent assaults and deportations of mostly brown and Black people, including citizens, solely based on skin color, language, and where they work.
The Nov. 26 shooting, one fatal, of two National Guard members in Washington was the pretext for the latest intensification of Trump’s anti-non-white immigrant crusade.
The shooter was a troubled Afghan former member of the CIA’s notorious “Zero Unit” death squads in Afghanistan who was resettled in the US after the war’s end. But the context is clothed in years of Trump’s demonization of immigrants from what he called “Third World” — and even “sh--hole” — countries, that has been a centerpiece of Trump’s political career. It has accompanied “Great Replacement” conspiracy theories of Democrats allegedly organizing immigrants of color to flood the US to supplant white voters, and an increasing normalization of racist rhetoric by the far-right.
In the aftermath of the shooting, Trump posted his intent to “permanently pause migration from all Third World Countries to allow the U.S. system to fully recover, terminate all of the millions of Biden illegal admissions … and remove anyone who is not a net asset to the United States, or is incapable of loving our Country, end all Federal benefits and subsidies to noncitizens of our Country, denaturalize migrants who undermine domestic tranquility, and deport any Foreign National who is a public charge, security risk.”
On Dec. 2, Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt verified that “refugee admissions into the country right now are essentially at 0, with the exception of Afrikaners fleeing persecution in South Africa.”
Many sources have debunked Trump’s promotion of the myth of a “white genocide” in South Africa, while he has also stated a preference for white Europeans who oppose migration.
That same day, Trump launched his vile denunciation of Somali residents, calling Rep. Ilhan Omar (D-MN) and “her friends” “garbage,” adding, “when they come from hell and they complain and do nothing but bitch, we don’t want them in our country. Let them go back to where they came from.”
Omar had a strong rebuttal: “When I think about Stephen Miller and his white supremacist rhetoric, it reminds me of the way the Nazis described Jewish people in Germany.”
And, she warned, “It’s also really important for us to remember that this kind of hateful rhetoric and this level of dehumanizing can lead to dangerous actions by people who listen to the president.”
Trump’s racist demagogy against immigrants of color is not new, but this tirade went further, noted Joanne Freeman, professor of History and American Studies at Yale University, in a Jon Stewart podcast.
“On the one hand, saying Somalians are a horrible people is a horrible thing to do. To go the next step and say, so we should throw them out, so they shouldn’t be here. That’s the part that suddenly not only moves into hatred and ugliness… and I’ve got my guys in masks… (and am) willing to enforce them in a way that isn’t constitutional.”
What’s also new is the administration denying citizenship to immigrants taking the final step at naturalization events, as occurred on Dec. 4 in Boston’s Faneuil Hall, despite their having spent years “acquiring a green card, extensive interviews, background checks, classes, and a citizenship test.” Instead, “as they lined up, some were told by US Citizenship and Immigration Services officials that they couldn’t proceed due to their countries of origin” — 19 countries from the Middle East, Africa, and Latin America.
“Officers were asking everyone what country they were from, and if they said a certain country, they were told to step out of line and that their oath ceremonies were canceled,” Gail Breslow, executive director of Project Citizenship, told Boston’s WGBH.
It comes as the administration is “detaining applicants at citizenship appointments — an escalation that blurs the line between immigration processing and enforcement, leaving families completely unprepared.”
Meanwhile, Trump’s Immigration and Customs Enforcement and Border Patrol raids continue to terrorize immigrant communities, enabled by the Supreme Court’s authorization of the selective targeting of people based on racial profiling, as well as the indifference to assaulting legal immigrants and even American citizens.
Among the latest targets for harassment and detentions, following Trump’s threats, were Somalis in Minnesota, even though more than 70 percent of Somalis are American citizens. The New York Times reaffirmed on Dec. 4 that less than 30 percent “of the people arrested in any of these operations had been convicted of a crime,” despite Trump’ claims that his secret police would only target the “worst of the worst.”
For Trump, racism has long been a fundamental belief, illustrated again Dec. 6 by the decision to eliminate free entrance days to national parks on the birthday of Dr. Martin Luther King and Juneteenth, while adding Trump’s birthday.
Additionally, Trump and other MAGA politicians have normalized a yearning to maintain the historic “culture” of the US and make the US the protector of “European civilization” — both an openly racist appeal to reverse the increased racial diversity of the nation.
In a Twitter screed attacking NATO members Dec. 6 following a trip to Brussels, Deputy Secretary of State Christopher Landau declared, “Either the great nations of Europe are our partners in protecting the Western civilization that we inherited from them or they are not.”
All of which is directly tied to the vision of a Make America Great Again movement that fantasizes a return to eras of Jim Crow segregation, even antebellum, policies in a nation more dominated by white, Christian populations. As Rep. Kat Cammarck (R-FL) framed it Dec. 2 in a not very subtle message: “Today, 1 in 6 people in the US is foreign born. That quite frankly is not sustainable to maintain a culture that we are known for here in the United States.”
- Chuck Idelson, retired, is the former Communications Senior Strategist for National Nurses United, the nation's largest union and professional organization of registered nurses with 225,00 members.
