Campaign Action
Donald Trump has said a lot of terrible racist stuff—a lot—but has he outdone himself this time? In the middle of a rant against Oakland Mayor Libby Schaaf for alerting immigrants to an upcoming Immigration and Customs Enforcement raid earlier in the year, Trump called undocumented immigrants “animals.” Really, he said that:
“We have people coming into the country — or trying to come in, we’re stopping a lot of them — but we’re taking people out of the country, you wouldn’t believe how bad these people are,” Trump said. “These aren’t people. These are animals.”
Sorry, he didn’t just call them animals, he explicitly said “These aren’t people. These are animals.” The official defense is that he wasn’t talking about immigrants in general, he was talking about MS-13 members, but … yeah, no. That’s not where he’s going with this.
Defining the human people you are scapegoating as non-human is pretty much eliminationist rhetoric 101. It’s a lot easier to brutalize people who you’ve written out of humanity, to say that their suffering doesn’t matter.
And while this is a new level of explicit dehumanization of immigrants, it’s already expressed in policy. As the Trump administration rips migrant children from their parents and puts them in internment camps, for instance, they tell us (and themselves) that it doesn’t matter because hey, "foster care or whatever," as if the separated parents and children will grieve any less or be any less terrified than they would have been if separated from their own children. Just as slave owners told themselves it didn’t matter that they were buying and selling human beings and ripping families apart because the people they had enslaved weren’t really people. Just as “During the Holocaust, Nazis referred to Jews as rats. Hutus involved in the Rwanda genocide called Tutsis cockroaches.”
That’s the language Donald Trump is using. It’s only fair to ask if those are the places he’s trying to take this country.