Donald Trump’s most loathsome venture yet
It’s a jarring bit of existential shock to hear a London cabbie or a stranger or a neighbour grumble to me about immigrants. Usually, before I get an opportunity to register a complaint, they hasten to add, “Not you, of course.” What they really mean is not white immigrants, of course. Not white, native English-speaking immigrants, of course. The immigrants they resent are the dark ones, the ones who speak broken English with a foreign accent.
They can dress it up any way they like, but that’s the real reason I don’t suffer from undue prejudice and other immigrants, just as educated, just as useful to society, just as law-abiding and just as harmless, do. My immunity comes courtesy of the actual root of the problem. I’m exempt because I’m a white American. What they really mean when they complain about immigrants is they can’t stand people of colour, or people of Slavic background from Eastern Europe, or people from Asia.
Racial intolerance has become so universally ubiquitous as to be almost invisible to its practitioners. They come to their hate by way of the people in charge. Some of the people in charge have manipulated them to hate immigrants in order to redirect their hate away from themselves. I understand. But to understand all is not to forgive all.
Sometimes bigotry comes in the form of gushing, patronising praise. We are the noble immigrants, the immigrants who understand and appreciate the freedoms and privileges the native born have come to take for granted.
While that is sometimes true it’s not always true. What is true is immigrants are just like everyone else, no better and no worse. They rise and fall on their own individual merits. Some of us are good, some of us are bad, but we are good or bad in roughly the same proportions as the people who are born here. The location on the planet we were accidentally born isn’t just irrelevant, it’s absurd, it’s ridiculous.
So when Donald Trump isolated an immigrant who murdered the daughter of a family with foreign antecedents it’s obvious what he’s doing. He’s data mining. He’s looking for a bad immigrant. It’s just as easy to find a bad immigrant as it is to find a bad native born American. He’s data mining to make a bigoted point, a point that’s irrelevant, absurd and ridiculous, but it exploits the confirmation bias of his audience of bigots.
When Trump then lies and claims he spoke to the members of the murdered woman’s family he is expropriating her family’s grief to suit his own cynical advantages. The real point is lost in a cloud of bigotry.
What’s really happening is, a bad man murdered a good woman, and a worse man is exploiting it so he can get elected president of the United States. Race, religion and national origin plays no part. His audience doesn’t understand this because they’re stupid.
They’re not the only ones who are stupid. Members of the mainstream media are largely missing the point of Trump’s latest hideousness as well. What he’s done is so hideous and unacceptable it should make headlines across America, and those headlines should stay up for weeks. But it will quickly be forgotten because that’s the world we live in.
What happened was this. Trump mentioned that he spoke to relatives of Ruby Garcia, a 25-year-old Michigan woman allegedly murdered last month by her boyfriend, an undocumented immigrant from Mexico. Garcia’s sister, Mavi Garcia, told a local TV station and several other news outlets that Trump had not spoken to anyone in the family. He lied so he could make Ruby’s tragic death all about him, and all about his hateful agenda. Trump is, in short, a loathsome, stinking piece of putrid shit.
Trump had so much contempt for the murdered victim and her family that he didn’t even bother to speak to them. He could have spoken to her family but he knew he didn’t have to. That would have been too much work, too much bother just to exploit people he has open contempt for. But he figured it would make a good story, one where he supposedly cosied up to people of foreign extraction with phoney empathy he doesn’t remotely feel so he could paint all immigrants the same colour of bigotry.
Like I said, Donald Trump is a loathsome, stinking piece of putrid shit. That should be the real headline, repeated in 30-pixel type across the world for the next six months. Because what he did is revelatory of just how awful, just how lying, just how unacceptably evil Donald Trump is. And, as ever, ladies and gentlemen, brothers and sisters, comrades and friends, stay safe.
Robert Harrington is an American expat living in Britain. He is a portrait painter.