Donald Trump’s Anti-American Values
Earlier in his speech, he claimed, “If we don’t get tough, and we don’t get smart—and fast—we’re not going to have a country anymore—there will be nothing left.” That is to say that isis is capable of achieving what the Soviet Union could not at the height of the Cold War—the destruction of the United States. This is not simply an error of degree but a failure of category. Trump, of course, offered himself as our only apparent savior. “We have an incompetent Administration, and if I am not elected President that will not change over the next four years,” he added.
.. Trump’s concept of graduated citizenship coexists comfortably with his insistence that collective responsibility be placed on the communities he considers suspicious. “Now, the Muslim community, so important,” he said. “They have to coöperate with law enforcement and turn in the people who they know are bad. They know it. And they have to do it, and they have to do it forthwith.” This thinking is not unfamiliar to anyone who has observed how racism works, how it suggests that one must constantly prove oneself worthy of trust.
If applied consistently after mass shootings, it would require that we hold the communities in Newtown and Aurora, the students at Virginia Tech, and the residents of the hundred and seventy-nine communities where shootings have occurred responsible for the violence of their neighbors, classmates, and relatives.