President Trump’s decision to send troops to the border in response to a group of refugees making their way through Mexico was always part of an effort to foment hysteria among his base; insisting that military action is needed has helped him create out of whole cloth a narrative that the U.S. is about to be invaded by criminals and even terrorists. Many have pointed out how these and other efforts to make the midterms about immigration have simply disappeared since, well, the midterms. But the White House’s authorization this week for the military to use deadly force to defend border patrol agents suggests that presidential rage and a hard-line anti-immigrant stance may have combined into a very real national crisis that has now taken on a life of its own.
Authorization of lethal force against migrants moves the series of inappropriate responses to those seeking a better life and shelter from harm out of the realm of black comedy, and into a more tragic sphere. As so many times before, the president would have the most powerful nation in the history of the world quail before unarmed, impoverished refugees, many of them women and children, in the name of goosing his approval ratings. But unlike before, the president is now apparently prepared to cross a line from hateful rhetoric to outright violence. The Trump administration seems intent on committing murder in the name of repelling an imaginary invasion.
This is the opposite of defending America’s borders and sovereignty. This is committing crimes in the name of illusionary political gain, by a man who has repeatedly proved himself unfit to hold the presidency. In the name of defending our borders, he would kill our nation’s soul, re-defining us a country that preys on the powerless and has been convinced of its own victimhood.
One illogical notion follows another, all based on the premise that immigrants and refugees are an existential threat to the United States. All manner of preposterous thinking flows from this premise, up to the notion that the military is needed to shoot immigrants rushing border posts. Take this statement from a Department of Homeland Security spokeswoman, who tells us that, “we will not allow our front-line personnel to be in harm’s way.” In other words, armed border patrol agents are actually incapable of defending themselves against these fantastic threats, and need the military to commit homicide in their defense. By this logic, the president will next be calling in the Marines to defend the helpless National Guard, so formidable is the challenge from down south.
For Trump, the important thing is not to secure the border so much as to introduce violence into the American political discourse. I think he has come to see his commander-in-chief role as something he can exploit to political advantage; he can order troops around, he can order them to kill, and he can use the troops as a sort of human shield, relying on Americans‘ widespread support of the American military to shield himself from horrific policy decisions. What scares me is that the president and his closest advisors seem not to understand how easily the line between threat and actual violence can be crossed. There is a bloodthirsty quality to this lethal force authorization. It is one thing to make war against our actual enemies; it is another thing entirely to make war against those who don’t pose a threat. It suggests a fundamental cowardice and unbalanced quality that we’ve seen many times before, and that we need to take seriously.