Source: The Washington Post / Getty
Here is a demonstrable truth that does not need to include an “allegedly” or any other type of disclaimer: Donald Trump is a xenophobic bigot.
And now that the immigration crisis at the U.S.-Mexico border has become a hot topic and a thing of major concern to the American populace—albeit, mostly on the side of the populace that adheres to the white nationalist Great Replacement Theory, which largely revolves around white conservative paranoia over migrants replacing white people in the U.S.—Trump is ramping up what should universally be perceived as anti-migrant hate speech.
During a campaign rally in Grand Rapids, Michigan, on Tuesday, Trump stood behind a podium before his loyal audience of MAGA minions and claimed, with zero evidence per usual, that “sick” migrants were coming into the country and spreading contagious diseases. He also called migrants who entered the U.S. illegally “animals” and declared that they were “not human.”
From New Republic:
“People were sick, we don’t want them coming into our country with contagious diseases, and they have it,” Trump said, despite the fact that he actively ignored the onset of the global pandemic, lied to the U.S. public about ways to treat Covid-19, and thwarted efforts to develop a vaccine. “All of a sudden you see these contagious diseases spreading, and everyone is saying, ‘I wonder where they came from.’ I can tell you where they came from.”
This, of course, isn’t Trump’s first time making this claim that zero notable public health specialists are consigning. Back in the early stages of his first presidential run—around the time when he was generalizing Mexican immigrants as “rapists” who are “bringing drugs” and “bringing crime” into the U.S.—he baselessly claimed Mexican migrants were bringing “tremendous infectious disease” to the U.S., and, more recently, he said that immigrants are “poisoning the blood” of the country, which is about as neo-Nazi-ish as a person can sound without just flat out shouting “Heil Hitler!”
Anyway, during the Michigan rally, Donald Trump also took the opportunity to dehumanize migrants completely based on an anecdotal case in which an American woman was allegedly killed by an undocumented immigrant.
“A 22-year-old nursing student in Georgia was barbarically murdered by an illegal alien animal,” Trump said in reference to the violent death of Laken Riley, a nursing student at Augusta University who was found dead in a wooded area at the University of Georgia campus in Athens on Feb. 22. Authorities believe she was killed by the aforementioned migrant from Venezuela.
“The Democrats said please don’t call them animals, they’re humans. I said no, they’re not humans, they’re not humans, they’re animals. And Nancy Pelosi told me that. She said, ‘Please don’t use the word animals, sir, when you’re talking about these people.’ I said, ‘I’ll use the word ‘animal’ because that’s what they are.’”
Since news of Riley’s death broke, MAGA conservatives have been exploiting her story to craft a racist narrative that migrants coming into the U.S. from our southern border are causing violent crime to spiral out of control while ignoring the statistical facts that show there haven’t been any surges in crimes in the cities most migrants have come to, and that, in many of those cities, crime rates have fallen.
Mind you, all of this fresh xenophobic propaganda comes not long after Donald Trump likened migrants to Hannibal Lecter and claimed many of them speak languages so foreign (as in “from the planet Mars”) that no linguists in the developed world can translate them.
We are dangerously close to electing for the second time a white nationalist bigot who has effectively normalized telling easily debunkable lies and spreading racist bigotry from the political pulpit.
It would be scary if it weren’t so…American.
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