Multiple sources, including Democratic Senator Dick Durbin, say that at a meeting between lawmakers and President Trump yesterday on immigration reform, the president asked why “he would want ‘all these people from shithole countries,’” in reference to immigration from African nations. Trump also asked why the U.S. needed more Haitians, adding “Take them out.” And as the sickly cherry on top, he also noted that the U.S. should admit more people from Norway, a country known not only for the whiteness of its snow, but of its populace as well.
As various people have noted, these comments are shocking without being surprising. Donald Trump launched his candidacy with a speech that declared Mexicans “rapists,” and his campaign repeatedly appealed to a broad spectrum of racist notions. In this one perverse way, at least, Donald Trump demonstrated truly egalitarian impulses, his racism encompassing all manner of black and brown people, or put more bluntly, all black and brown people. His discrimination did not discriminate. And since taking office, he has, among other reprehensible behavior, picked fights with African-Americans at an alarming rate; dismissed the severity of the crisis facing Puerto Ricans; and pardoned a man who tortured Latinos in detention centers that the pardonee liked to refer to as “concentration camps.”
But we are right to be shocked. Shocked at this president’s lack of self-control; shocked at the depth of hatred and stupidity which his expression of these thoughts telegraphs to the rest of us; shocked anew at the situation we are in, with a white supremacist in the White House, and a sense of helplessness, disbelief, and even fear over how we got here. Let’s not forget that the White House’s initial response to reports of the remarks was not simply to deny them, but to let it be known that they thought such sentiments would play well with Trump’s base. This response speaks both to the debased ways in which the president seeks to hold on to power, and to the degraded state of any of his supporters moved by such appeals to racism. And the inability of Republican politicians to forcefully condemn the president's remarks reminds us that they're all in with completing the GOP's conversion into white supremacism's institutional defender. Trump may have spoken the words, but the rot has overtaken the Republic Party as a whole.
There must be a point where the president’s lack of any moral authority means that politics as usual can no longer be conducted. At a minimum, how can Democrats justify working with this president on immigration, when the policies he’s arguing for stem from a racist and un-American worldview? How can they be party to even a watered-down version of this president’s immigration policy, tainted as it inevitably is by a fundamental belief in the superiority of white skin over dark?
This president, and the advisors he’s surrounded himself with, view maintenance of the U.S. population as majority white to be of the highest priority. They squawk about profound cultural differences between newcomers and established citizens, and about how immigrants steal American jobs, but their inability to calibrate the distance between these plausible-sounding claims and outright racism keeps giving the game away: it’s all about the racism. After all, if the president’s interest is in protecting American jobs — as he’s said countless times — then why is his administration arguing that we need to have merit-based immigration, in which well-educated newcomers would be MORE likely to take jobs from existing citizens? Merit has become shorthand for people with white skin and who preferably already speak English.
When the president makes openly racist comments, white Americans in particular have a greater responsibility than non-whites to respond forcefully. Such comments are not only an attack on non-whites — in this case, people of African descent — but they’re also implicitly an appeal to other white people to uphold racism as something we all hold in common. Trump feels it is OK to express such hateful ideas because he believes other people also say these things. Certainly some white people do; but many more not only do not, but despise the racism that motivates it. And it is on all of us to say that we’ve had enough, more than enough. Every attempt to conscript us into this movement of right-wing hate and resentment needs to be called out for the abomination that it is. I know that for my generation, and for the cohorts born after me, racism is by and large considered a disqualifying character trait, whether in a coworker, a friend, or a politician. At times like this, it feels so clear that Trump is only still president through the forbearance of older generations who do not see racism as a non-negotiable evil.
