The president cannot be absolved of responsibility for inciting the hatreds that led to El Paso.
Connor Betts, the alleged Dayton shooter, had left-wing political views, believed in socialism, supported Elizabeth Warren’s candidacy, and regularly inveighed on Twitter against various personages on the right (including, it turns out, me). This has some conservatives fuming that liberal media is conveniently ignoring the progressive ideology of one shooter while obsessing over the far-right ideology of another — Patrick Crusius, who posted an anti-immigrant manifesto shortly before police say he murdered 22 people at a Walmart in El Paso.
Sorry, but the comparison doesn’t wash. It’s idiotic.
The Dayton victims did not fit any political or ethnic profile: They were black and white, male and female, an immigrant from Eritrea and Betts’s own sister. Crusius’s victims, overwhelmingly Hispanic, did: They were the objects of his expressly stated political rage.
What happened in Ohio was a mass shooting in the mold of the Las Vegas massacre: victims at random, motives unknown. What happened in Texas was racist terrorism in the mold of Oslo, Charleston, Pittsburgh, Christchurch and Poway.
The former attack vaguely implicates the “dark psychic force” that Marianne Williamson spoke of in last week’s Democratic debates. The latter directly implicates the immigrant-bashing xenophobic right led by Donald Trump.
This needs to be said not because it isn’t obvious, but because too many conservatives have tried to deny the obviousThe president cannot be absolved of responsibility for inciting the hatreds that led to El Paso.
. It’s not about ideology, they say: It’s a mental-health issue. But that’s precisely the kind of evasive reasoning many of those conservatives mockedin 2016, when the mental state and sexual orientation of Orlando nightclub shooter Omar Mateen was raised by some media voices to suggest that his attack had not really been an act of Islamist terrorism.
Alternatively, conservatives have cited the decline of civil society, the effects of the de-institutionalization of the mentally ill, the paucity of prayer and the ubiquity of violent video games — in sum, the breakdown of “the culture” — as explanations for mass shootings. This is the right-wing equivalent of the left’s idea that poverty and climate change are at the root of terrorism: causes so general that they explain everything, hence nothing. Why not also blame Friedrich Nietzsche and the death of God?
Get real: The right’s attempt to downplay the specifically ideological context of the El Paso massacre is a transparently self-serving attempt to absolve the president of moral responsibility for his demagogic rhetoric. This, too, shouldn’t wash. The president is guilty, in a broad sense, of a form of incitement.
No, Trump did not specifically incite anyone to violence, as characters like Yasir Arafat once did. (“To Jerusalem we march, martyrs by the millions!”) He will not, as Palestinian leaders still do, offer financial rewards to the families of terrorists. His scripted condemnation on Monday of white supremacy was, at least, a condemnation.
But incitement takes many forms. In June 2018, Trump tweeted the following: “Democrats are the problem. They don’t care about crime and want illegal immigrants, no matter how bad they may be, to pour into and infest our Country, like MS-13. They can’t win on their terrible policies, so they view them as potential voters!”
The tweet (noted by my colleague Frank Bruni in a recent column) is significant precisely because it is almost forgotten. It does not even rank in a top 10 list of Trumpian outrages. And yet it’s all there:
- The imputation of bad faith to his political opponents.
- The conspiracy theory about “potential voters.”
- The sneaking conflation of illegal immigrants with violent gang members.
And the language of infestation. In the early 1990s, Hutu propagandists in Rwanda spoke of the Tutsi as “cockroaches.” The word served as a preamble to the 1994 genocide in which over half a million people died. In today’s America, the dissemination of the idea, via the bully pulpit of the presidency, that we are not merely being strained or challenged by illegal immigrants, but invaded and infested, predicated the slaughter in El Paso.
It’s worth noting that the Walmart massacre is, as far as I know, the first large scale anti-Hispanic terrorist attack in the United States in living memory. On current trend, it will surely not be the last or the worst. The language of infestation inevitably suggests the “solution” of extermination. As for the cliché that sensible people are supposed to take Trump seriously but not literally, it looks like Patrick Crusius didn’t get that memo.
The main task for Democrats over the next 15 months won’t be to convince America that they need yet another health care re-invention, or that the economy is a mess, or that the system is rigged, or that the right response to Trump’s immigration demagoguery is an open border. It’s that the president is
- a disgrace to his office,
- an insult to our dignity,
- a threat to our Union, and
- a danger to our safety.
Jared Kushner Makes Trump Look Like An Idiot
Trump forgot that his family is a bunch of slumlords. Cenk Uygur and Ana Kasparian, hosts of The Young Turks, break it down. MORE TYT: https://tyt.com/trial
Read more here: https://www.newsweek.com/trump-critic… “Critics of President Donald Trump responded to his recent labeling of Elijah Cummings’ congressional district in Maryland as “disgusting” and “rodent infested” with photos of neighborhoods in Republican-controlled districts that also appeared to be rife with homelessness, poverty and waste.
Trump on Saturday railed against Cummings and Baltimore — about half of which falls in the congressman’s district — calling the city “disgusting rat and rodent infested.” Rather than decry or disavow the president’s remarks, Trump’s allies and conservative media outlets like Fox News attempted to bolster his claim by sharing photos and video of destitute and dirty portions of the Maryland metropolis. White House Chief of Staff Mick Mulvaney said Sunday he’d have been “fired” from running his former South Carolina congressional district if it had as much crime and homelessness.
But Trump critics began pointing out these images were cherry-picked and failed to tell the whole story of Baltimore or the many suburban and rural communities included in Cummings’ district, they also posted pictures of their own of neighborhoods blighted by poverty and crime.
What’s more, these photos were reportedly taken in congressional districts and states controlled by staunch Republican Trump defenders, including Ohio Congressman Jim Jordan, Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell of Kentucky and Rep. Devin Nunes’ district in California’s San Joaquin Valley and Fresno.”
Why a Rogue President Was Forced to Back Down on Family Separation
It was clear from the start that the policy was cruel, heartless, and unnecessary. Although there has been a spike in the number of asylum seekers in recent months, the over-all number of undocumented immigrants coming into the United States from Mexico and other Latin American countries is significantly lower than it was a decade ago. There is no “crisis” at the southern border, except the humanitarian one of Trump’s own making. Trump’s picture of the United States being swamped—or, in his words, “infested”—by Latino migrants is a fantasy that he concocted to whip up the racial fears and antipathies of his core supporters.
.. Clearly, Trump didn’t make this U-turn because he had grown tired of fear-mongering and racial incitement, or because he had experienced a crisis of conscience.
.. He reversed course because he had no choice politically. Although he often adopts the rhetoric and body language of an authoritarian strongman, he’s an elected politician. And in the face of mass outrage, bipartisan opposition, and condemnation from church groups and other civil-society institutions, the child-separation policy was no longer sustainable.
.. If Trump gets his way, families stopped at the border will now be detained indefinitely under the custody of ice.
.. the Department of Health & Human Services .. won’t make any special efforts to reunite the families that have already been split up, and that the separated children will be dealt with under the same processes that have been in effect since May.
.. At most, this was a very partial U-turn.
.. Trump only went this far because he was facing a public-relations disaster and a rebellion from Republicans fearful of losing control of Congress in the midterms.
.. Mitch McConnell, until now Trump’s faithful enabler on Capitol Hill, stated publicly that he and his fellow Republican Senators were in agreement that the child-separation policy “needs to be fixed.” On Wednesday morning, Paul Ryan, the Speaker of the House, said that on Thursday the lower chamber would “vote on legislation to keep families together.”
.. In the past year and a half, congressional Republicans have demonstrated that there is little they won’t do to abase themselves before Trump, if it means getting the policy results they desire. But even usually gutless pro-Trump Republicans weren’t willing to enter a campaign season defending a policy of tearing infants from their parents and keeping them detained in tents and metal cages.
.. white, non-college-educated white women, a key voting group for the G.O.P., were opposed to the policy by the whopping margin of fifty-six per cent to thirty per cent.
.. we still have to maintain toughness, or our country will be overrun by people, by crime, by all of the things that we don’t stand for, that we don’t want.”
.. indicated that he intends to stick with his campaign theme of targeting undocumented immigrants, and depicting them as base creatures who could “infest” the United States.
Trump the European Nationalist Puts America Last
President Trump, in concert with several European leaders, including those of Hungary, Poland, Austria and Italy, is intent on dehumanizing immigrants and refugees. The aim is to equate them with terrorists and criminals ready to “infest” — Trump’s word — American and European civilization, defined as a threatened white Judeo-Christian preserve.
It’s a consistent policy buttressed by insinuation and lies about the supposed threat, and designed to manipulate fear and nationalism as election-winning emotions in a time of rapid technological change, large migrant flows and uncertainty. Vermin infest, not humans.
Every utterance of Trump on immigration is meant to conflate immigration with danger. This is a direct repudiation of America’s distinguishing essence — its constant reinvention through immigrant churn.
The immigrant brings violence. The immigrant brings terror. The immigrant’s humanity is lesser or nonexistent. These are tropes about “the other” whose capacity to galvanize mobs, and wreak havoc, was proved in the first half of the 20th century. Trump does not hesitate to use them.
.. Viktor Orban, the right-wing Hungarian leader, who has said that “every single migrant poses a public security and terror risk.”
.. The Hungarian parliament has just passed legislation that would throw people in jail for providing assistance to asylum seekers and migrants.
.. Matteo Salvini, the rightist Italian interior minister
.. Before taking office, he said Italy was packed with “drug dealers, rapists, burglars,” whom he wants to send home.
.. the destabilizing impact of globalization on Western democracies; stagnant middle-income wages; growing inequality; fear of an automated future
.. the ease of mob mobilization through fear-mongering and scapegoating on social media.
.. Trump is strong because of a global nationalist lurch; that his feral instincts make him dangerous; and that he may well win a second term, just as Orban has now won four terms.
To ridicule Trump will achieve little absent a compelling social and economic alternative that addresses anxiety. The Democratic Party, for now, is nowhere near that.
.. Trump likes to go for the jugular. He sees opportunity in a Europe that is split down the middle between nations like Hungary and Poland that make no attempt to sugarcoat their anti-immigrant nativism and states like Germany that have not forgotten that the pursuit of racially and religiously homogeneous societies lay at the core of the most heinous crimes of the last century.
.. Orban is the most formidable politician in Europe today. It’s no coincidence that Trump called him last weekend. Their aims overlap.
.. Trump tweeted this week that “Crime in Germany is way up” and that allowing immigrants in “all over Europe” has “strongly and violently changed their culture.”
.. Trump (whose stats on German crime were wrong) backs Orban against Chancellor Angela Merkel of Germany in the continuing bid to make racism and xenophobia the new normal of Western societies.
.. the greatest danger is within. A two-term Trump presidency would likely corrode American institutions and values to the point at which they could scarcely be resurrected.