Republican presidential candidate, former President Donald Trump speaks in the library at Mar-a-Lago on March 4, 2024, in Palm Beach, Florida. | Source: Alon Skuy / Getty
Donald Trump just might be the most effective propagandist we’ve seen in generations. Mind you, he’s not effective because he’s objectively smart, cunning or universally influential. Trump has managed to normalize idiocracy, bigotry and outright lies because America is so chock full of anti-intellectual white nationalists (whether they’re aware that’s what they are or not) who wilfully believe any old lie as long as it validates what they already want to believe.
Trump has made immigration reform a focal part of his Republican primary campaign in the 2024 presidential race. He has done so by standing behind podiums and making such outlandish, easily debunkable and blatantly racist remarks about migrants from the southern border that his 2015 remarks generalizing Mexican immigrants as “rapists” who are “bringing drugs” and “bringing crime” almost seem tame by comparison.
Let’s start with Trump’s appearance at CPAC outside Washington, D.C., where he talked about foreign languages like he was someone’s racist grandpa (which he is) who showed up to Thanksgiving dinner drunkenly babbling about being abducted by Martian communists who hate America. (Seriously, that isn’t as much of an exaggeration as you think.)
“We have languages coming into our country. We don’t have one instructor in our entire nation that can speak that language,” Trump said. “These are languages — it’s the craziest thing — they have languages that nobody in this country has ever heard of. It’s a very horrible thing.”
From NBC News:
Trump repeated the comment the following week during an appearance at the southern border alongside Texas Gov. Greg Abbott, saying that migrants are entering the country speaking “truly foreign languages.”
“Nobody speaks them,” he said after a tour of the border in Eagle Pass.
And addressing a rally in Virginia Saturday night, Trump described New York classrooms as overwhelmed with “pupils from foreign countries, from countries where they don’t even know what the language is.”
“We have nobody that even teaches it. These are languages that nobody ever heard of,” he claimed.
Just so we’re clear, Trump believes migrants are coming into the U.S. who speak languages that are so rare and unheard of that, in the so-called greatest country in the world, we don’t have a single interpreter or educator who can decode them for the American public. Trump really thinks people are hopping over the border speaking verbal hieroglyphics.
“We don’t even have teachers of some of these languages,” Trump said Monday during an interview with Right Side Broadcasting Network. “Who would think that? We have languages that are, like, from, from the planet Mars. Nobody, nobody knows how to, you know, speak it.” (Told you the alien abduction thing wasn’t that far off.)
It’s unclear what languages Trump is referencing—since, you know, he’s just making things up—and in all the times he’s repeated this narrative, he has not specified a single instance in which an American educator, multilinguist or foreign language translator complained about coming across migrants who speak languages no one can interpret. It’s almost as if he’s just out here lying for white supremacist “likes” and “shares.”
The worst part is, Trump’s remarks about foreign languages were light work compared to other things he said during his Right Side interview, which took place in front of an audience at his Mar-a-Lago resort in Florida, according to the Guardian.
“They’re rough people, in many cases from jails, prisons, from mental institutions, insane asylums,” he said. “You know, insane asylums, that’s Silence of the Lambs stuff. Hannibal Lecter, anybody know Hannibal Lecter?”
Again, just so we’re clear, Trump has graduated from calling migrants from the southern border rapists and drug dealers and is now calling them Hannibal Lecter-like patients at facilities for the criminally insane, which he has presented no more evidence to support than he did when he called them rapists and drug dealers.
After Trump made his absurd and cruelly dehumanizing remarks about migrants, he said over the laughs and applause of his audience, “We don’t want ’em in this country,” and if you don’t recognize that he sounds just like every Klan speaker to stand on an American stage ever, it’s because you’re the Klan speaker’s audience.
Right now, we are dangerously close to electing for the second time a bigoted U.S. president who has effectively normalized bringing white nationalist rhetoric and easily disprovable lies to the main stage of American politics. And the issue isn’t that Trump and his followers are un-American, the problem is they’re too American. White nationalism is traditional America, and that’s what they want to make great again.
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