Refugees and survivors of international religious persecution met with Donald Trump, the one man who could not care less about their lives, yesterday, and, as usual, his lack of empathy combined with his overwhelming ignorance made for a truly appalling event. The worst part was his exchange with Nadia Murad, the Iraqi who escaped ISIS and is an activist in preventing sexual assault. She told him her harrowing story, which Trump would interrupt with stupid questions. Example:
Murad: All of this happened to me. They killed my mum, my six brothers…
Trump: Where are they now?
She told him that her people were desperate for a safe place to live. “I’ll strongly look it to that,” was his single response to everything she said. She also told him that 86,000 of her people were able to emigrate to Germany. Of course, this is precisely the thing that Trump routinely ridicules Angela Merkel for- allowing asylum seekers into the country.
Nothing was worse than his questions about her Nobel prize win. “And you had the Nobel Prize? That’s incredible. They gave it to you for what reason?” Well...yeah! Exchanging love letters with the world’s worst despot doesn’t get it?
Watch the exchange...and cringe.
Remember, everyone visiting him in the Oval Office represents all the people he denigrates and rails against over and over. They are the people he claims are ruining European culture and bringing crime and infesting wherever they go, according to his tweets and his speeches. They are the enemy he is always raging about. They are the "them" that should not be able to be with "us." Those visitors and the people who arranged the meeting thought that if Trump met some of them he could recognize them as fellow human beings, who needed the help of the United States, because the country stood for something moral. The people who arranged the meeting were wrong,