U.S. President Donald Trump is an endless fountain of abrasive and inflammatory statements, but comments Wednesday in which he appeared to refer to undocumented immigrants as “animals” was seen in some quarters as going to a very dark place.
A counter-backlash was quick to arrive.
The White House said on Thursday that Trump was referring to the MS-13 gang, not to immigrants in general …
… and on Friday, Trump (unavoidably) denounced Wednesday’s stories as “fake news.”
First, we should look at the context of the comments. Trump was meeting at the White House with a group of Republican officials from California to discuss a new law that makes it a “sanctuary state,” a term that broadly means that state and local police wouldn’t help federal officials carry out deportations. The group looked at how this would affect federal deportation policy in California, from a Republican point of view.
One point of discussion was MS-13, a violent gang founded in Los Angeles by Salvadoran refugees. However, there were only four mentions of MS-13 as such by anybody at the meeting, which took just under an hour.
One came just before Trump’s comments, by Margaret Mims, sheriff of Fresno County. What follows is from the official White House transcript, which you can read here (Ctl-F for ‘animals’.)
SHERIFF MIMS: Thank you. There could be an MS-13 member I know about — if they don’t reach a certain threshold, I cannot tell ICE about it.
THE PRESIDENT: We have people coming into the country, or trying to come in — and 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. These aren’t people. These are animals. And we’re taking them out of the country at a level and at a rate that’s never happened before. And because of the weak laws, they come in fast, we get them, we release them, we get them again, we bring them out. It’s crazy.
As Dara Lind points out in Vox, Mims was complaining about state law that prevents sheriffs from reporting people in their custody to federal immigration officials just for being suspected gang members, if they haven’t also been charged with or convicted of a serious crime. In other words, the group under discussion may be terrible criminals, who some would call hardly worthy of being called human, but a court has yet to properly decide that.
Was Trump quoted fairly?
Yes, under the circumstances.
Was he referring to MS-13, and not to deported immigrants more generally?
From context, maybe, but you can read it several ways, which given the level of rhetoric is itself dangerous. It makes a strong second-day talking point to claim he was, however, as Sanders demonstrates.
Why is this important?
The bigger point is that people with power need to use language carefully. People with a lot of power need to use language very carefully.
Another is simply an awareness of the tragic arc of history, something that until recently was an appealing feature of thoughtful conservatism. As several commentators pointed out, there is a long tradition of preparing people for acts of serious violence by dehumanizing an out-group. The Khmer Rouge called their enemies “worms,” the Rwandan government called Tutsis “cockroaches,” the Nazis called their victims Untermenschen, or subhumans.
Lind’s interpretation, which a close reading of Trump’s comments tends to support, is that his strategy is to use MS-13 to dehumanize a larger group:
“He sticks to the same rhetorical move … refer to some specific criminals, call them horrible people and animals, say that their evil justifies his immigration policy, and allow the conflation of all immigrants and all Latinos with criminals and animals to remain subtext.”
“Because the president spoke in scattered generalities, he didn’t make it clear exactly which humans he considers unhuman — something he could have taken pains to specify.”
No sooner had the name of the alleged Texas school gunman, Dimitrios Pagourtzis, been announced that a Facebook page appeared seeming to link him to both Hillary Clinton and Antifa. The Clinton hat is Photoshopped in.
In brief:
- Twitter is rolling out new automated tools to try to curb abuse on the platform. Caroline Orr (perhaps better known as @RVAwonk) explains in this thread how the design of the changes won’t stop abusers and will penalize their victims. “The solutions to many of these problems (online abuse, disinformation, digital manipulation, etc.) must be human-centred, because the problems themselves are largely human-based,” she argues.
- At BuzzFeed, a look at how white supremacists pay to have their comments on YouTube videos promoted through the platform’s new Super Chat. “Super Chats are underwriting the growth of extremist content on YouTube by generating monetary rewards for those most willing to push the envelope,” one expert explains.
- Facebook ads created by Russian trolls have a look and feel that makes them easy to spot — or so I thought before I failed this Vice quiz.
- And speaking of the Russian ads, the Internet Research Agency targeted a music app at teenage girls in the United States which, when installed, started messaging all their Facebook friends.