We Are a Nation of Immigrants That Also, Somewhat Confusingly, Also Hate Immigrants
In his disastrous debate with Kamala Harris, Donald Trump came off as a one-issue candidate unhealthily obsessed with immigration.
Everything came back to immigration and Trump’s hatred and fear of immigrants. He was relentless in hammering home the idea that all of our problems are rooted in Biden and Harris opening up the borders to millions of dark-skinned rapists, murderers, and puppy-eaters so that they kill our children, rape our women, somehow simultaneously steal our jobs and collect welfare by refusing to work and, finally, eat our pets.
MAGA-style Racism is changing and de-evolving. It’s getting sicker and more extreme. They’re stepping their racism game up by trying to convince voters that evil brown people from Haiti are dining upon our cats and dogs and getting away with it because the left is too “Woke” and “politically correct” to acknowledge their unforgivable transgressions.
Trump and his loathsome sidekick, JD Vance, are locked into the lie that Haitians are eating pets in a small town in Ohio. They’ve made it a cornerstone of their campaign. The disgraced, twice-impeached ex-president and thirty-four-time felon is all about spreading fear and hatred. Trump doesn’t just want voters to fear and hate immigrants; he needs them to fear and hate immigrants. He needs to dehumanize them. He needs to make them seem sub-human and inherently evil to justify mass deportations and other extreme measures.
If Elon Musk was not a badass alpha male, would he wear a cool hat like that?
Vance recently got into trouble when he was grilled on CNN about his ridiculous claims and said that the campaign had to create stories to get the media to focus on the horrible destruction Haitians have wrought in Springfield, Ohio.
Defenders would argue that Vance was saying that it fell upon the Republican ticket to come up with a media-friendly narrative to get the media to pay attention to the horrible crimes ostensibly being committed by all the brown people rather than conceding that he made that shit up to suit his political purposes.
To Vance, it didn’t ultimately seem to matter whether Haitians were killing and eating dogs and cats in Springfield; what matters is that making racist memes and xenophobic jokes is an excellent way to highlight the civilization-threatening evil of immigration. It’s enough to be loud; you don’t have to worry about the particulars when the hate is pure and strong.
Donald Trump and JD Vance clearly hate immigrants, yet Trump is married to an immigrant. He was previously married to Ivana Trump, an immigrant. Two-thirds of Donald Trump’s wives have been immigrants. His son Barron is a first-generation American.
Vance, meanwhile, is married to the daughter of immigrants. Ted Cruz, who shared a meme of two worried cats accompanied by the words “Please Vote for Trump So Haitian Immigrants don’t eat us,” is similarly the son of Cuban immigrants.
We are a nation of immigrants. Except for the Native Americans who survived the genocide of their people, everybody in the United States came from somewhere else.
Yet, we are also a nation that also hates immigrants. That would seem to be a contradiction, except that we don’t hate all immigrants; we just hate the ones that are not white.
The Republicans’ vilification of illegal immigrants is explicitly race and class-based. Republicans don't have a problem with rich, beautiful European women coming to the United States to work as models and marry wealthy businessmen.
Trump doesn’t seem to have a problem with immigration anywhere except South of the Border. He’s consumed by the idea of black people rampaging across open borders to commit crime sprees against patriotic, hard-working Americans. By “patriotic, hard-working Americans,” they, of course, mean “white people who vote for Trump.”
It seems safe to assume that Melania Trump does not feel a sense of connection with Haitians accused of what to us seem like unforgivable crimes because she’s also an immigrant. The same holds true of Ted Cruz. They lack the empathy and humanity to see brown immigrants as having as much dignity and value as their non-American parents or spouses.
Look at Elon Musk. Like my wife, he’s a South African immigrant. Unlike my wife, he’s intent on shutting down the border and ensuring that non-white, non-rich people don’t have the same opportunities that he does.
We are a nation of immigrants who hate immigrants. That holds true of the MAGA contingent even when they themselves are immigrants or the spouses or children of immigrants.
Nathan needs teeth that work, and his dental plan doesn’t cover them, so he started a GoFundMe at https://www.gofundme.com/f/support-nathans-journey-to-dental-implants. Give if you can!
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