I don't like writing about Trump. I feel I've written more than I ever wanted or intended to write on Trump. I've always been Never Trump and never liked the man. In part, I force myself to be disciplined in writing, particularly if and when I'm being critical. It is easy to vent, harder to be specific and objective. I've put it in practice, e.g., in arguing against those who would seek to ban Trump's candidacy on a strained inference of the third section of the Fourteenth Amendment.
I mostly avoid almost all Trump coverage and don't follow any of his social media accounts, but it's almost impossible to avoid his omnipresent outrageous soundbites either directly from his tweeting minions or from outaged Democrats/leftists if you are at least somewhat active on Twitter/X. To be sure, there's nothing new to Trump's shtick: his incessant rants against immigration, his repetitious soundbites, insulting nicknames for others, his constant self-promotion and empty promises
So, when I heard in passing an exchange with Trump's favorite interviewer over being a dictator, well, at least the first day of a second Trump term, I instantly rolled my eyes. I knew Trump gets off on trolling the mainstream media and getting a rise out of leftists; he loves all the attention he gets by saying the unexpected, in the sense that all publicity is "good". He knows leftists claim to value "democracy", so how better to outrage them than to telegraph being a "dictator"? There's a part of me which perversely is amused by how Trump lives rent-free in the heads of leftists. The fact is, Trump lusts for the imperial Presidency; so does the Left, as long as they hold the power. Trump always asserted during his Presidency, he held all the power with limitless authority. This is rubbish since the Constitution enumerates a small number of enumerated responsibilities. He cannot tax and spend on his own, he cannot declare war; treaties and appointments must be approved, and Congress has oversight authority over the Administration. Of course, he knew there were limitations to his authority because he was unable to repeal and replace ObamaCare and he was never able to secure the border wall funding.
So, loosely paraphrased from other accounts (I haven't seen the relevant video clip), when Hannity asked Trump a softball question about exaggerated leftist fears about a dictatorial second term, Trump, with his weird sense of misguided humor, deliberately deciding to provoke leftists in the process anticipating their outrage, not unlike how Archie Bunker could set off his progressive son-in-law "Meathead" Michael Stivik with just a few words, saying well he would be a dictator, at least for the first day of his second term. The way I took his "humor" was to say he was going to work at warp speed to rollback Biden executive actions and/or reinstate his own; this shouldn't surprise anyone; after all, Biden had done the same type thing at the start of his own term. The basic difference is Trump's provocative useof language. This is not to say I don't support the repeal of some Biden policies, depending on context. I simply don't like the idea of an imperial Presidency, from the left or right and the abuse of executive orders.
But where I finally snapped was when Trump escalated his anti-immigration rhetoric to even more disgusting level, even for Trump. Regular readers to my blog and my Twitter/X feed already kmow I'm strongly pro-immigration. I have little doubt I'm running against the wind; my related posts and tweets attract few pageviews or impressions or engagements (likes or retweets). Of course, open immigration is a logical extention of the constructs of free markets and trade, Even though my French-Canadian ancestors emigrated to New England in the nineteenth century, we still had pride in our Framco-American heritage, including our Roman Catholicism and bilingual homes. As I've mentioned, French was my first, preferred language though the beginning of kindergarten. I took pride in the melting pot construct of America; I grew up a military brat in an integrated USAF and had neighbors or school mates who were black. Latino, or Asian-descent; I've lived in 3 Mexican border cities and earned my first degree at a university located in a San Antonio barrio. I worked for nearly 3 months in Brazil in 1995, learning enough Portuguese to get by. I've worked with foreign workers on international projects and a number of immigrants from multiple Asian countries. I have nephews and nieces who have married or have seriously dated blacks or Latinos (one from Ecuador); I myself have dated blacks and Latinas. I have one close Indian immigrant friend on the West Coast and know the hell he went through earning his green card.
When RN finally got his green card sometime after I left our client (and my employer after my "job offer by extortiom" {"Don't come back Monday unless you agree to our offer now": I was a subcontractor for M, also RN's sponsor. I had zero interest in moving to California. SS had occasionally flirted with the idea of hiring me perm, but I never initiated relevant discussion or encouraged it: I had a no-compete clause, meaning I couldn't work for AA for at least 6 months after the engagement. M, of course, could deal me to client AA for a price. And if SS had told M my subcontract had ended that Friday, M would have laid me off in a heartbeat. So I told SS that M would sue me if he hired me; he laughed and said he had leverage over M in underpriced invoices for my services. So I agreed if they would cover any legal expenses. You son't want to hear what M said to me in the aftermath; "Benedict Arnold" was the tamest. Dude, I had stretched a 5-week engagement to 3 months. I'm not the bonehead who mispriced invoices)), M no longer had a legal hold over him; RN soon landed an offer with AA and eventually succeeded SS as IT manager. (There's a separate story of my leaving AA in the inteim. SS reneged on some promises, and I was due to fly to Austin, TX for a job interview [I had been trying to return to TX for years] when SS had a heart attack touring our Vermont facility. If I left AA then, AA would have been seriously screwed. So I stayed untill SS was back on his feet. Think SS was grateful? Nope.)
So, continuing the story, when RN told me he got his green card, I immediately asked him if he was going to become a US citizen. He uncharacteristically bit my head off: "Why does everyone ask me that? Let me hust relish this moment: it took so long to get to this point." I was just confused by his reaction because I had wanted it for him since we first met, and I love him like a brother. He later apologized for his reaction.
One day years later he casually ended at the end of his email: "Oh, by the way, I became a US citizen the other day." Oh, why didn't you say anything? I would have flown aross the country to br there for him. I was so proud of him and this moment.
It's not just RN. Some of the guys I knew back in the OLL men's dorm were the first-generation college student sons of parents who worked the hard life of migrant farm workers with the hope their children, too, might live the American dream. Me, I couldn't win the local race for dogcatcher, never mind the US Presidency. But when I indulge that fantasy, I imagine presiding over a mssive swearing-in and telling them they embody the spirit and promise of America and how privileged I am to represent and serve them.
I've discussed Trump's disgusting history on immigration in past posts and tweets. Now to be sure, the GOP has a checkered history on immigration. As much as Trump likes to cite Lincoln, what did Lincoln say about it? "If there are any abroad who desire to make this the land of their adoption, it is not in my heart to throw aught in their way, to prevent them from coming to the United States." True, there have been some odious exceptions to a relatively open immigration process until the twentieth century, especially the exclusion of Chinese, but we really saw the origins of the current quota system about a century ago under GOP POTUS Coolidge, a man I otherwise admire; Coolidge was motivated to restrict immigration concerned by labor protectionism and the spread of political ideologies like socialism from abroad, although Coolidge was repelled by some aspects of the new law like racially-motivated exlusion of the Japanese. Hoover and Eisenhower were more concerned about migration across the Southrern border, although part of Eisenhower's approach was to legalize migrant labor flow:
The Patrol veterans say enforcement could also be aided by a legalized guest- worker program that permits Mexicans to register in their country for temporary jobs in the US. Eisenhower’s team ran such a program. It permitted up to 400,000 Mexicans a year to enter the US for various agriculture jobs that lasted for 12 to 52 weeks.
Xenophobic aspects of immigration restrictions were masked by professed law and order concerns, disregarding legal pathways for entry were all but sealed shut.
Reagan wanted to make immigration more transparent and orderly but accepted amnesty for hard-working migrants already here, of addressing exploitation of those living in the shadows:
Peter Robinson, a former Reagan speechwriter, agrees. "It was in Ronald Reagan's bones -- it was part of his understanding of America -- that the country was fundamentally open to those who wanted to join us here."
Robinson says Reagan's own diaries show the president found the idea of a militantly staffed border fence difficult to take. In a private meeting with then-President Jose Lopez Portillo of Mexico in 1979, Reagan wrote that he hoped to discuss how the United States and Mexico could make the border "something other than the location for a fence."
Where he would have differed, Robinson says, is his welcoming attitude toward immigrants.
"He was a Californian," Robinson says. "You couldn't live in California ... without encountering over and over and over again good, hard-working, decent people -- clearly recent arrivals from Mexico."
And this excerpt is from Reagan himself:
Our nation is a nation of immigrants. More than any other country, our strength comes from our own immigrant heritage and our capacity to welcome those from other lands....We shall continue America's tradition as a land that welcomes peoples from other countries. We shall also, with other countries, continue to share in the responsibility of welcoming and resettling those who flee oppression....We have a special relationship with our closest neighbors, Canada and Mexico. Our immigration policy should reflect this relationship.We must also recognize that both the United States and Mexico have historically benefited from Mexicans obtaining employment in the United States. A number of our states have special labor needs, and we should take these into account. Illegal immigrants in considerable numbers have become productive members of our society and are a basic part of our work force. Those who have established equities in the United States should be recognized and accorded legal status.
In addition to Reagan era immigration reform the Bush Presidencies also embraced Reagan-style immigration reform; George W. Bush almost succeeded when Dems, under union pressure (not unlike the end of the Bracero program in the mid-60's) kicked out a temp foreign worker program compromise. Media conservatives, still seething over Reagan's amnesty of "illegal aliens" and ongoing unauthorized entry post-reform, became more entrenched post-Bush and eventually hijacked the Tea Party movement. Romney basically adopted an antagonistic policy towards unauthorized residents, encouraging self-deportation.
In pior posts, I've cited a post-Election 2012 interview where Trump attributed Romney's loss to his "cruel" self-deportation policy. Trump really didn't take ideological stands during his earlier (pre-2015) runs, esprcially his failed 2000 run for the 2000 Reform Party nomination. Oh, Trump still had failed conceptual understandings of the trade deficit and was critical of free trade even back in the 80's. But Trump's argument for the Presidency was primarily one that he was uniquely qualified as a "genius" businessman to be President.
As historian Brion McClanahan has often pointed out,ideologically Trump is a New Deal Democrat. Note his refusal to deal with overdue senior entitlement reform, soon to exhaust program reserves. Personally, I'm convinced that Trump decided post-2000 that his best chance to become POTUS was through a major party nomination and probably his most viable path was as a Republican. He had no natural constituency, so I believe he looked to build bridges to the populist right-wing, including but not restricted to his revival of the birther nonense against Obama.
A second step was to put immigration restriction policy on steroids. This horrific, false statement came from his 2015 candidacy announcement:
"When Mexico sends its people, they're not sending their best," Trump said. “They're not sending you…They're sending people that have lots of problems, and they're bringing those problems with us. They're bringing drugs. They're bringing crime. They're rapists."
I'm not going to recite here the history of his term, his futile obsession with getting more border wall funding, his cruel migrant family separation policies, his illegal shifts of DoD money to finance the border fence, his Muslim immigration ban. etc. As I've previously pointed out, his immigration did little to reduce the number of unauthorized residents; it had more effect on reducing the flow of legal immigrants, with already backlogged queues, an economic disaster since many skilled immigrants contribute to our crown jewel high tech industry growth and are a vital source of job-producing entrepreneurs.
There's little doubt that the Biden record on Reagan's ideal of an orderly flow of migrants and our infrastructure to support it has been a failure and plays to Trump's signature restrictionist policy. I know Trump's shtick is to engage in attention-grabbing exaggerated soundbites, but his latest kerfuffle went beyond my already low expectations:
The former president also echoed the words of Adolf Hitler during his anti-immigrant ranting at the rally. “When they let — I think the real number is 15, 16 million people into our country — when they do that, we got a lot of work to do. They’re poisoning the blood of our country,” he said of immigrants coming into the United States. “That’s what they’ve done. They’ve poisoned mental institutions and prisons all over the world — not just in South America, not just the three or four countries that we think about, but all over the world. They’re coming into our country, from Africa, from Asia — all over the world. They’re pouring into our country.”... As Rolling Stone reported this week, Trump also plans to send vast numbers of U.S. troops — potentially “hundreds of thousands” — to close the southern border and help build a network of immigrant detention camps should he serve a second term.
In October, Trump made similar Hitler-esque comments, as The Washington Post reports: “It is a very sad thing for our country,” Trump said. “It’s poisoning the blood of our country. It’s so bad, and people are coming in with disease. People are coming in with every possible thing that you could have."
Trump added during an Iowa rally: “It’s the blood of our country; what they’re doing is destroying our country.”
This is an unmistakable reference to Hitler's racist rhetoric:
But there’s a dark history to this idea: It’s the exact language used by Hitler to build the case for a Nazi regime and whip up popular support for his program of extermination of Jews and other minorities. In his manifesto “Mein Kampf,” Hitler wrote, “All great cultures of the past perished only because the originally creative race died out from blood poisoning.” In another passage he describes Jews as disabling Germany through blood poisoning: “It seemed as if some all-pervading poisonous fluid had been injected by some mysterious hand into the bloodstream of this once heroic body.” Hitler also argued that “Teutonic” — Germanic — people in North America owed their dominance to avoiding miscegenation: “In North America the Teutonic element, which has kept its racial stock pure and did not mix it with any other racial stock, has come to dominate the American Continent and will remain master of it as long as that element does not fall a victim to the habit of adulterating its blood.”
It's bad enough Trump is using an ethnic construct to represent a nation built on a heritage of open ethnically-diverse immigration, a melting pot of sorts. (For exanple, none of my 6 siblings married another Franco-American, although one BIL has family ties to St. Thérèse of Lisieux. There are about 9.4 M Franco-Americans, maybe 3% of the population. I have black and brown grandnephews and/or grandnieces, all much loved.) Trump, disingenuous as always, denies Hitler's reference in his choice of words, denies any knowledge of Mein Kampf I'm personally exhausted and repulsed by Trump's constant divisive, negative partisan rhetoric (if he isn't going after leftists, he's targeting "establishment Reepublicans", the media, anyone who disagrees with him, no positive, constructive leadership). We Americans deserve better.
