Often our words are more than words—they are floodlights.
They pierce through our facades and our artifice, and into our shadow places, and they reveal who we are.
Many times our words illuminate what is most true about the contents of our hearts, even as we try to conceal them.
This week at a roundtable in California, Donald Trump said these words about undocumented immigrants and showed us who he is:
“We have people coming into the country—or trying to come in, 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.”
Do you hear the historic dog whistles ringing out?
Do you see the familiar pattern repeating?
Do you recognize the time-tested playbook?
People who lived in Europe in the 1930s and 40s will.
The narrative Trump builds here (and has throughout his Presidency) is breathtakingly clear:
There are hordes of predatory, invisible “bad people” out there, somewhere.
These bad people are trying to get to you and the rest of the good people.
You’re in imminent danger from these bad people.
I’m going to protect you (the good people) from these very bad people.
When you can get human beings to believe this kind of grotesque fantasy, they will give you carte blanche to do and say all manner of horrific things in order to save them. There will be no rock bottom too cavernous, no behavior too reprehensible, no words too cancerous.
We have seen this in white American Evangelicals over the past two years: their doubling down, their normalizing, their complicity with unthinkable cruelty. It’s because they believe they’re the victims.
In Trump’s incendiary white lie, there is one common thread running throughout:
The encroaching sub-human monsters, those vile, gathering hordes in the tales he tells—they are never white American Christians.
Never.
They are outsiders and immigrants and illegals.
They are Muslims and Mexicans.
They are gays and Atheists.
They are archetypal foreign terrorists in Middle Eastern garb.
They are Transgender deviants lurking in restrooms.
They are unseen hordes of brown-skinned animals snarling at our borders.
Cue the dog whistles.
Over and over again, this is the story this President writes, because this is the one his target audience needs to hear.
It is the one that most leverages their fears, triggers their nationalistic fervor, stokes the torch fires of their prejudice—and enlists them in the imaginary battle for morality, in which they alone stand on the side of goodness.
And the vomit-inducing irony, is that Donald Trump and those responding to his code language and his racist fairy tales, are the people most existing at the periphery of decency right now.
They are the ones pushing the limits of what human beings can do to other people and still claim Humanity.
They are the ones justifying hospital room ICE raids and family deportations, the ones advocating for torture, the ones making coarse jokes about dying senators, the ones trafficking in anti-Semitic social media slurs and racist memes, the ones hounding teenage shooting survivors and demonizing gay kids.
This President’s supporters will invariably rationalize away his recent words as hyperbole or exaggeration, or say he was taken out of context. They’ll claim such language is justified for gang members and criminals—and fail to acknowledge how loosely Trump plays with the Humanity of people of color.
This President declaring a group of human beings inhuman, in order to justify his inhumane treatment of other people is the issue here. Just as when he hits the panic button on “terrorists” and “Muslim extremists” in order to make his travel bans seems necessary, Trump is creating a false image of immigrants so he seems reasonable in building walls and deporting Dreamers. And it all plays perfectly to the choir he’s preaching to.
Make no mistake: this President’s supporters both know what his words imply—and they agree with him. That’s what happens when bigotry believes the story it needs to believe.
Donald Trump’s words have once again revealed him.
When you refer to a specific violent group of torch-wielding white supremacists marching through a Virginia town square as “fine people,” and a faceless crowd of brown-skinned human beings as “animals”—you’ve pretty much declared who you are.
When you refer to countries of brown-skinned people as “shithole countries” and their inhabitants as “animals” you’ve revealed what your agenda is.
The question becomes, what will his words reveal about the rest of us?
It is 2018 in America.
We cannot allow this sickening narrative to be repeated.
We cannot tolerate the dehumanizing of any human beings.
We cannot abide the recklessness of turning people into animals.
We know what this breeds. It breeds death.
Push back hard against this hatred.
Resist the violence in these reckless words.
Refuse to stay silent when the liars purse their lips to signal fear’s arrival.
Loudly shout out the dog whistles.
Order John’s forthcoming book ‘HOPE AND OTHER SUPERPOWERS” here!
