Trump’s Core Belief
Next week ICE will begin the process of removing the millions of illegal aliens who have illicitly found their way into the United States. They will be removed as fast as they come in. – Tweet from President Donald Trump, 6/17/19
It is the core belief of those that support Donald Trump. He started from the very beginning, from the “glide” down the golden escalator in Trump Tower. Some of the first words Donald Trump spoke were about “Mexico” sending immigrants:
“They’re sending people that have lots of problems, and they’re bringing those problems with us (sic). They’re bringing drugs. They’re bringing crime. They’re rapists. And some, I assume, are good people.” Trump’s announcement speech – 6/16/15 – Time
So it should be no surprise that in his 2020 campaign “re-boot,” he raises the specter of “illegal immigrants” once again. The fact that ICE is physically unable to round-up millions of undocumented immigrants isn’t important. What is critical to the Trump Campaign, is that he can once again reach into the darkness and find the hate that powered him to the White House, regenerating that energy for 2020.
Trump generates fear. Many Americans feel left behind by all of the social changes of the past fifty years. America has changed racially, socially, sexually: Trump has summed all of this fear up in the phrase “Make America Great Again.” What it really means is to make America 1950’s again, the era where whites were dominate; the Leave it to Beaver world that didn’t really exist, especially for minority Americans.
An axiom of propaganda is that there needs to be someone to blame. The Communist revolutionaries in Russia blamed the “Bolsheviks,” the middle class that benefited from the Czarist government. Hitler blamed the Jews, for the loss of World War I, for the economic depression of the late 1920’s, for the “corruption” of German youth by academia.
From the moment he came down the escalator, Trump has used undocumented migrants as his group to blame. He has called them Mexican rapists and murderers, even though most aren’t Mexicans. It doesn’t matter, they are “brown skinned” and “look like” Mexicans. Trump blames them for illegal drugs, even though his own Customs Department states that the vast majority of illegal drugs come through legal crossings (16 tons of cocaine seized on a ship in the port of Philadelphia this week CNN.)
The President presents a simplistic solution to the problem; build a Wall. It won’t solve the drug problem, and it won’t stop determined migrants. But it will cost $30 to $40 Billion to build, it is a physical “symbol” of Trump’s hate, and it “sounds” like it might work.
Trump takes the very small minority of undocumented migrants who do belong to organized crime gangs like MS-13, and turns them into the threat he needs to scare his white suburban and rural base. He feeds into the fear they feel, making them “stay small” and away from the urban areas where they might interact with “brown” people.
And he blames Democrats: “They would strip Americans of their constitutional rights while flooding the country with illegal immigrants in the hopes it will expand their political base, and they’ll get votes someplace down the future. That’s what it’s about. And we are building the wall. We’re going to have over 400 miles of wall built by the end of next year.” (Trump rally speech – Orlando, 6/18/19 Factbase)
Trump has built camps, to hold the migrants he has ordered captured. We use all sorts of euphemisms from “detention facilities” to “tent cities,” but they are what they are: concentration camps. (Note: there is a difference between concentration camps, used by the British in South Africa during the Boer War, the US with Americans of Japanese descent in World War II, and Hitler’s Death Camps.) Just because they aren’t starving and murdering folks, doesn’t make it ‘OK’. (Esquire)
And he allows American officials to take children away from their parents. It’s happening still, and many of the children taken in the past have not been reunited with their parents. The youngest was four months old (New York Times.)
It’s not about solving the problem at the border. That solution is apparent: deal with the crime and poverty in the “Northern Triangle” of Guatemala, El Salvador and Nicaragua. Folks are leaving there because they feel there is no choice; that it is worth the risk of all that can happen on the trip North. Better that, than the certainty of poverty and violence that their homes offer.
But that answer doesn’t feed into Donald Trump’s political needs. It doesn’t raise money, fill stadiums, or excite voters. So he threatens millions of the undocumented, raising the vision of kids returning from school or daycare to empty homes, their parents incarcerated by ICE. Millions won’t be “rounded up” but some will, to serve as an “example.” More outrages will be committed, all in the name of “MAGA.” And all to serve a single purpose: win in 2020.
