The real danger in what Donald Trump is doing

| 3:00 pm EDT October 4, 2024
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Meet Jamie McGregor. Jamie is a white, fifth-generation resident of Springfield, Ohio, and the owner of McGregor Metal. His company makes tractor parts. Jamie voted for Donald Trump in 2016. Then he did it again in 2020.

When the Springfield city fathers and mothers invited members of the Haitian community to come to Springfield to live and work, Jamie was ecstatic. He needed employees to help run his tractor parts factory, so he hired many of the Haitians. Today, Haitian employees comprise thirty of Jamie’s three hundred employees.

When an ugly lie about the Springfield Haitian began circulating, Jamie was incensed. He knew the Haitians personally, knew they were good, hardworking and honest. He defended the Haitians. “They come to work every day,” Jamie told The New York Times. “They don’t cause drama. They’re on time.” He also defended his employees on PBS NewsHour, noting that the Haitians are also his most reliable employees.

Within hours of those interviews, Jamie and his family began receiving death threats. Posters started springing up all over town proclaiming Jamie to be a traitor. Jamie’s 14 year old daughter has started carrying a gun. Even Jamie’s 80 year old mother has been threatened with death. “We are being hunted like animals,” Jamie’s wife said. Jamie’s life has become a living nightmare. Jamie has had to shut his factory down. All because he told the truth. All because he defended good people who were being unjustly maligned.

The hatred Jamie and his family have attracted are all thanks to Donald Trump and JD Vance, who took a lie about the Springfield Haitians that they knew to be untrue and repeated it. They repeated the lie that the Haitians were illegal aliens. They are not. They repeated the lie that the Haitians are killing and eating family pets of the white people of Springfield. They are not. Not a single incident of such a thing has ever been reported.

The lie was created to help Donald Trump inspire fear of brown people, so they could use that fear to help him get elected to the presidency again and avoid prison. Trump and Vance know about Jamie McGregor and the chaos they have caused him. They know about the nightmare they have created for every peaceful and law abiding Haitian in Springfield. They don’t care. They have doubled down on the lie.

Instead of changing the subject Trump and Vance continue to feed the lie that Haitians have overwhelmed Springfield and have turned it into a hellscape of theft and rape and murder, when in fact the Haitians have added immeasurably to the community. They are quiet, peaceful and hardworking. They would be an asset to any community anywhere.

None of this matters to MAGA. MAGA isn’t about making anything great. MAGA is about grievance, outrage, hatred and anger directed at others for failures and disappointments in their own lives that are nobody’s fault but their own. MAGA is about the ugliest, most despicable of human impulses fueled by abject self-pity, cowardice and bigotry.

And no one is safe, not even MAGA itself, not even two-time Trump voter and white tractor parts factory-owner Jamie McGregor. Because MAGA is about hate, and hate destroys everything in its path. And, as ever, ladies and gentlemen, brothers and sisters, comrades and friends, stay safe. Donate now

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