Comments | Trump makes the case for a proto-racial cleansing plan

In an interview on “The Hugh Hewitt Show” on Monday, former President Donald Trump presented an offensive new series of disinformation about migrants crossing the US-Mexico border. He falsely claimed that Democrats were allowing large numbers of murderous immigrants to cross the border and roam freely in the United States based on a report on non-citizen crime rates that he twisted to avoid known. Then he woke up a horrible thought: “You know, now I am a murderer, I believe this, it is in their genes. And we have a lot of bad genes in our country right now.”

This reads like a classic Trumpian racist statement. Using false statistics about crimes committed by immigrants, Trump falsely claims that Latino immigrants tend to kill, and do so because of “bad genes.” Put the facts together and say that Latino immigrants have “bad genes.” (A Trump campaign official later said that in his Hewitt appearance Trump was talking about “murderers, not immigrants.”) Instead, Trump praised Minnesota’s largely white audience as blessed. with “good genes.”

Horrible things. But it goes deeper than that.

Something even darker emerges if you take Trump’s increasingly vicious rhetoric describing immigrants as ignorant and look at it alongside his broader policy agenda. of expulsion. Trump is laying the groundwork for what could be considered a proto-ethnic cleansing plan. He is not calling for people to be forcibly removed from the country based on their race. But his arguments against immigrants are based on the idea that people of certain races are so unpopular that extraordinary resources can be given to drive them away. In this process, Trump positions his entire organization to align what it means to be part of America and race.

This election cycle, Trump’s statement about immigrants has become very strange and Hitlerian: Immigrants are “poisoning the blood of our country” and are contaminated with “bad genes.” It’s Darwinian sociologist talk from a guy who also talked about his subscription to the “horse theory,” which The New York Times describes as “the idea derived from horse breeding that groups of good blood produces the best children.” And Trump and his deputy, Sen. JD Vance of Ohio, spreading false stories of Haitian immigrants eating domestic animals in Springfield, Ohio, in order to portray them as cruel parasites.

On top of all this, Trump continues to promote the doctrines of a “big change” conspiracy, which claims that Democrats want to rig the election and “stop” Americans with non-white immigrants. It’s not just a lie; it is based on the assumption that immigrants from the Global South are naturally inclined to oppose or undermine the interests of its true citizens, who are mostly white.

What makes Trump’s immigration crackdown particularly important is that it is working on a strategy: the mass deportation of undocumented immigrants on an unprecedented scale. (Notably, Trump has described his mass deportations as a housing policy, which is absurd.) Trump has also supported the idea of ​​”deportation,” promising to send Haitian immigrants back to Haiti. . even if they live in the US legally. And Trump’s adviser, Stephen Miller, has promised that efforts to undermine immigration through the office created by Trump’s Justice Department in 2020 will be “ruined” if Trump re-enters the White House. (At the time, The New York Times reported: “Some Justice Department immigration officials expressed concern that denaturalizations could be used more broadly to revoke citizenship.”) – states many that he has put in place when he is in office.

Trump’s agenda does not fit the definition of ethnic cleansing, as the legal basis for deportation would be based on legal status, not race. But it is important that Trump’s description of migrants from the Global South as an existential crisis threatens to serve as his public justification for his deportation regime. It is also important to denigrate immigrants to generate power sharpness and scale of this government. He joins his political establishment in viewing immigrants — a demographic that has helped define every generation of America’s growth, prosperity and cultural innovation — as an abomination. It is a question of thinking about where the next leader of this organization can take things.