Donald Trump is a stupid, stupid man
Whenever the acronym TACO (Trump Always Chickens Out) is applied to Trump, I’m reminded of Joe Pesci’s character Tommy in the movie “Goodfellas.” Tommy was a psychopathic killer whom it was dangerous to goad, even jokingly. Sometimes someone got murdered, sometimes they didn’t. It was a game of Russian roulette best unplayed.
But the acronym has become so universal I’ll take that chance in the service of a point. Trump finally acknowledged what every reasonably intelligent ninth grader already knows, that if you start indiscriminately rounding up all the undocumented workers in the United States you will ruin whole vital industries beyond repair in a single stroke.
Recently Trump posted a self-serving, egomaniacal screed on “Truth” Social that said in part: “Our great farmers and people in the Hotel and Leisure business have been stating that our very aggressive policy on immigration is taking very good, long time workers away from them, with those jobs almost impossible to replace.” Gee, ya think? He goes on to blame the nonexistent “VERY Stupid Biden Open Door Policy.” The Terrorist-in-Chief finishes by writing “Changes are coming!”
The point is that Trump’s terroristic campaign against brown people is hurting rich people. He’s going to actually have to start working for a living. He’s going to have to figure out how to differentiate the criminals from the undocumented — a tiny minority — so he can still supply bigoted red meat to his MAGA base without hurting his rich cronies.
Of course, having undocumented workers in the US is like having unmarried people living together. It’s a civil, not a criminal matter, and it really hurts no one. They still pay billions in taxes, they support local industries with their labour and, MAGA to the contrary, they never vote.
They’re kind of like me, living in England. I don’t break laws. I pay taxes. I can’t vote, etc.. Except I’m white and here legally, and the former is obvious and the latter invisible. The anti-immigrant hullabaloo in the United States is nothing more than poorly disguised bigotry, and those who participate in it do so largely because they dislike brown people, in other words, because they’re bigots.
To be sure, there are people who object to foreigners of any stripe, white or brown, including here in England. Their specific kind of bigotry, jingoism, is pretty thin on the ground here. I’ve encountered maybe half a dozen times in the more than 20 years I’ve lived here.
But the real reason behind all the anti-immigration sentiment in the US comes from the fact that large swaths of people are bigots. Were it otherwise the “immigration problem” wouldn’t be news.
So I give you Trump as Tio TACO, that is, Uncle TACO. His headlong terrorism against brown people to satisfy millions of American bigots has some obvious drawbacks for rich people. It’s a conundrum he would have seen coming from a mile away if it were not for one simple and salient fact: Trump is a stupid, stupid, stupid man.
Robert Harrington is an American expat living in Britain. He is a portrait painter.