When a U.S. senator from Alabama calls immigrants “inner-city rats,” that’s hate. When a U.S. congressman from Georgia suggests that migrants should be dropped from helicopters, that’s hate. When a U.S. president refers to Democrats as “vermin,” “scum,” “poison,” “crooked,” “misfits,” “communists,” “Marxists,” “low IQ,” “stupid,” “radical left lunatics,” “losers,” and claims they “hate America,” are “trying to destroy America,” and are “a threat to democracy” — that, unmistakably, is hate.
For the past 45 years, the Republican Party has often relied on coded language — dog whistles — to deliver a diluted strain of hostility. But Donald Trump amplified that vitriol. He embodies hate in its most aggressive form. Trump consistently applies a familiar authoritarian strategy: identify a vulnerable population, vilify and demonize them, and instill fear in his followers through blatant lies, distortions, and dehumanizing rhetoric. Then he presents himself as the only one capable of protecting his followers while vowing to punish those he declares responsible.
Undocumented immigrants have endured some of the most vicious treatment under this narrative. Trump has made over 12,000 public statements regarding immigrants — nearly all of which are inflammatory, misleading, or outright false. He repeats these claims relentlessly, even when corrected, knowing that repetition breeds belief among his audience. But recently in an astounding, but not surprising, act of betrayal, he has screwed his followers and the rest of us with his championing and passage of his One, Big Beautiful Bill Act resulting in the largest transfer in our history of our wealth to billionaires. “America first” is now billionaires first.
Conor Power
Montague