Trump’s project: Dehumanizing folks his base sees as different
WASHINGTON >> It’s never right to call other human beings “animals.” No matter how debased the behavior of a given individual or group, dehumanizing others always leads us down a dangerous path.
This is why we need to reflect on the controversy over exactly whom President Trump was referring to as “animals” during a roundtable discussion last week at the White House with state and local officials from California on so-called sanctuary laws.
On its face — and this is certainly how Trump wants us to view things — this is an argument about whether the media distorted his intent.
But Trump is responsible for this problem precisely because he systematically obliterates any distinctions between the overwhelming majority of immigrants who are law-abiding and the violent minority among the foreign-born.
The slippery inexactness of Trump’s language is often ascribed by his detractors to the deficiencies of his verbal skills and his lazy tendency to return again and again to the same stock words and phrases. Trump’s admirers frequently cite his use of colloquial language as key to his success in persuading so many that he is not a traditional politician.
But both of these innocent explanations underestimate Trump’s gift for using incendiary words that send clear messages to his supporters. He is brutally calculating in finding ways of casting large groups of people as undeserving of dignity. Dehumanizing those he and his core constituents see as radically different is central to Trump’s project.
The White House event where Trump made the comment was a gathering last Wednesday of California officials opposed to what Trump called “deadly and unconstitutional sanctuary state laws.” They offered, Trump said, “safe harbor to some of the most vicious and violent offenders on earth, like MS-13 gang members, putting innocent men, women and children at the mercy of these sadistic criminals.”
Trump’s use of “animals” came when Margaret Mims, the sheriff of Fresno County, said not being able to cooperate fully with federal immigration officials, Mims argued, made efforts “to find the bad guys” far more difficult.
Mims later added, “There could be an MS-13 gang member I know about” and that if “they don’t reach a certain threshold,” under the state’s law, “I cannot tell ICE about it.”
This is when Trump declared: “You wouldn’t believe how bad these people are. These aren’t people. These are animals.”
The New York Times and other outlets tweeted that Trump used the “animals” reference about unauthorized immigrants generally and did not make mention of Mims’ invocation of MS-13. Trump’s claim is that it should have been obvious that he meant only MS-13 members.
But throughout his presidential campaign and since, Trump has regularly blended talk about all immigrants with specific attacks on immigrants who committed serious crimes — particularly those who belong to the murderous MS-13. Even assuming that Trump was, in fact, limiting himself to MS-13 in his reply to Mims, he has spent years creating rhetorical links between the foreign-born as a whole and the bloodshed perpetrated by the few.
By playing fast and loose with language, Trump avails himself of escape hatches, as he did last week.
No one wants to be put in a position of seeming to say anything good about gang members. Yet Trump’s strategy of dehumanization must be resisted across the board. We cannot shy away from what history teaches. Pronouncing whole categories of people as subhuman numbs a nation’s moral sense and, in extreme but, unfortunately, too many cases, becomes a rationale for collective cruelty.