Trump Stokes the Fascist Fires with Campaign of Hate
Luis Bracamontes killed two police officers after a day-long crime spree in California in 2014. He was convicted and, in April, was sentenced to death.
Bracamontes is, in many ways, a villain out of central casting, a composite of all the fear-mongering and anger that surrounds the immigration issue and that has fueled the political rise of Donald Trump. He was a repeat border crosser and convicted drug dealer. His shaved head and chin-strip goatee with trailing, greased tail, he is the personification of the gang-member stereotype that shows up on L.A. and Miami cop shows, and his laughing, remorseless mien presents the perfect bogeyman for politicians looking to slander an entire population.
Let’s not mince words. That’s what Donald Trump is doing by giving sunlight to a 53-second ad that cross cuts images of a smiling, laughing, defiant Bracamontes with contextless scenes of crowds that appear to be Mexican immigrants ripping down fences and storming what we are to assume is the southern border is a massive slur. It is the visual counterpart to his speeches — starting with the racist call to arms that kicked off his campaign in 2015.
CNN calls this ad the most racially charged since the misleading Willie Horton ad of 1988 — a sentiment shared by many in the media — and while this may be true, it does not go far enough in denouncing this as a tactic.
That’s because commentators insist on focusing only on the upcoming mid-term elections — which are vital, to be sure, but only represent a sliver of what is happening. This is part of a broader rhetorical assault tied to the “nationalist v. globalist” construction, to his and the right-wing’s attacks on George Soros and other Jews, his verbal attacks on protesters, especially black football players who have deigned to disobey their overseers.
It starts with his primary slogan — Make America Great Again, a slogan that is backward looking, that attempts to raise up a mythic version of an America that has never really existed except for the white majority. MAGA is racist dog-whistle, the “again” meant to take us back to a time when African Americans knew their place, when Latinos were allegedly happy to work the fields, Jews stayed in their own neighborhoods, and Muslims were completely invisible. In this myth, men were men and women were women, gays and lesbians were closeted, and no one questioned the prerogatives of white male power — on our shores and abroad.
It is all about definition — in particular, the layered definition the word “nation.” A quick look at Merriam-Webster’s gives a hint at the different shades of meaning the word carries. There is nationality — i.e., ethnic background and the sense of “a people.” There is political unit with established borders and territory. Our current political debate is playing out in the space between these two conceptions of the word, with Trump adeptly conflating the two while at the same time hammering home the cultural/ethnic meaning of the word to create a “them” against which the “us” can be marshaled. It is what Jason Stanley discusses in his book, How Fascism Works — the mix of myth and resentment, the notion that we’ve lost an edenic past, that we have been victimized by these “others,” that “the nation” — in both senses — is under assault.
So images of “hordes” of brown people storming fences intercut with those of Bracamontes smirking and laughing strike an emotional chord that is also struck by Trump’s call to end birthright citizenship and his sending of troops to the border to defend against an “invasion.”
This is why the ad is only part of the larger project of the Trump regime, and it is why it strains credulity to assume that his repeated attacks — or at least his willingness to entertain attacks, as he did yesterday — on George Soros as the lead funder and organizer of an assault on America by brown-skinned people is not part of a larger and more damaging project.
It’s why Trump’s proposal to send troops to the border must be vociferously denounced. Arguing about the cost — however pragmatic that may sound — leaves the option on the table and does nothing to push back against the characterization of immigrants as invaders; rather the troop presence makes the word “invasion” concrete, the military re-enforcing that this can only be handled militarily. You meet an invasion with military force. Debate over.
Then on Wednesday, according to The Hill, Trump deflected questions about rumors that George Soros is funding the caravan of Hondurans heading north to the U.S. border. He didn’t accuse Soros of controlling events, but he went to one of his go-to answers, one that both genuflects to the anti-Semitic right and allows for a plausible deniability that allows his supporters to ignore the historical overtones of what he is selling.
Here is how The HIll describes it:
“I wouldn’t be surprised,” Trump told reporters outside the White House when asked if “someone” is paying for the caravan.
“George Soros?” a reporter interjected.
“I don’t know who, but I wouldn’t be surprised,” Trump said. “A lot of people say yes.”
This is fairly standard Trump. Allow a conspiracy to be floated and, when given a chance to refute it, leave it hanging. “A lot of people say” — his way of distancing himself from the conspiracies in which he and his ilk traffic.
This Soros line ties into a slur that is hundreds of years old, that Jews are a secret cabal that runs the world, a line Trump himself frequently has used more directly at rallies and elsewhere for quite some time and that he ramped up when the Honduran caravan started moving north. Trump has argued that someone is paying for the Honduran caravan as a way to destabilize his presidency or swing an election. His favored culprit has been Soros — the right’s bogeyman, who “happens” to be a Jewish financier.
This is not accidental. The white nationalists who marched in Charlottesville chanted “Jews will not replace us,” a line that only makes sense if you know the history and only if you tie it to other elements of the right’s agenda and realize that the claim is that Jews will fund the movements and people — read this as brown people — who will “replace” whites, who will eliminate white culture, which according to the white nationalists is the Jews’ ultimate goal.
Saturday’s synagogue shooter in Pittsburgh was an anti-Semite steeped in these arguments, a man who believed in a “globalist Jewish” conspiracy to bring in illegal immigrants to destabilize white America. He thought Trump wasn’t sufficiently nationalist and was too close to “the Jews,” but his arguments were essentially the ones Trump, Fox and the rest of the right-wing media have been spouting.
But Trump can claim not to be engaged in this anti-Semitic myth-making, and his supporters can avoid acknowledging their own complicity in these anti-Semitic and racist conspiracies, by claiming “a lot of people say” or by pretending not to realize that George Soros, the globalist financier, is Jewish.
The national response to the Pittsburgh shooting was encouraging, but also indicative of our inability to understand the systems that are in place — as does the relative lack of attention paid to the assassination in Kentucky of two African Americans by a white supremacist. People from both sides of the aisle and from mostly all faiths raised their voices against hatred, but in doing so they conflated hatred with the uses of hatred, which differ for each group. Anti-Semitism, anti-black, anti-Asian, and anti-Native American racism, immigrant and LGBTQ bashing, Islamaphobia differ in significant ways, but they are related related and linked. They operate in different ways and need to be addressed both individually and by dismantling the larger systems of oppression that connect them and disguise the naked push for power and control they conceal.
As Carly Pildis writes in The Tablet, “platitudes about love and togetherness are not enough.”
We must name specific oppressions and put attacks in a historical context that names the killers and the oppressors, together with their targets. It is not enough to merely denounce white supremacy. If you do not fight anti-Semitism by name, then you are an enabler of white supremacists and anti-Semites, who are often, though not always, the same people.
To erase Jews, and to erase the ideology of anti-Semitism, from a crime committed against Jews by an avowed anti-Semite, is to rob us of our identity and our history at the very moment we are being victimized. You won’t understand anything that way.
To make excuses for Trump and the right’s weaponizing of Soros, to claim as too many do that his reclaiming of the word “nationalist,” his vilification of “globalists,” and his racist descriptions of African Americans and Mexicans are not what they appear is to be a participant in the racism and anti-Semitism Trump is selling.