By Dehumanizing Others, Trump Makes Sure We Remain Our Own Worst Enemies

And now Trump consciousness purports to claim—or reclaim—control over America: the land of white Christian nationalists and no one else, damnit!

But of course that level of selfishness—mine, mine, mine!—is only possible to maintain with a huge helping of fear alongside it: fear of the enemy. Fear of “them.”

Thus Alexandra Villarreal, writing in The Guardian about Trump 2.0’s first day in office (on Martin Luther King Day), noted, “He immediately involved the military, ordering the armed forces to ‘seal’ the U.S.’s borders ‘by repelling forms of invasion including unlawful mass migration.’

Be afraid. Be very afraid.

The belief that love is for white people only belittles love as a transformative concept: as the means to push beyond what, or who, we know, and continue evolving.

She goes on, “This new system at the border—replete with intense militarization and explicit violations of human rights—comes straight from the imagination of the ‘great replacement’ conspiracy theory, which pushes the racist idea that non-white immigrants are ‘invading’ predominantly white nations and ‘replacing’ white culture.’”

Governance is so much simpler when you can conjure up a wicked enemy for your followers to fear, but the cost of doing so can be monstrous—and not simply for those dehumanized as the enemy, who are usually not in positions of power and therefore easily exploited. Those pulled into us-vs.-them consciousness have also seriously minimized their own lives. For instance, Andrea Mazzarino, writing about U.S. President Donald Trump’s “divisive rhetoric around immigrants, calling them ‘vermin’ who are ‘poisoning the blood of this country,’” stirred up an old childhood truth in me: Takes one to know one!

You can’t dehumanize others without belittling your own soul.

And this begins to get at what makes the Trump 2.0 phenomenon so painful, at least to that part of the nation that sees beyond him. It’s not just because “they” (i.e., MAGA) won. Hate rhetoric—hate consciousness—is once again expanding its claim on who we are as a nation. But it’s not like this is new. Most of our history is inextricably linked with the exploitation, dehumanization, and, often enough, the murder—of... uh, non-white people of one sort of another.

When the MAGA-hat wearers cry “Make America great again,” they mean make America deaf again, Make America unaccountable again. Turn Uncle Stam into Jim Crow again.

The belief that love is for white people only belittles love as a transformative concept: as the means to push beyond what, or who, we know, and continue evolving. Consider this quote of Martin Luther King Jr. (which I don’t believe wound up being quoted during the Trump inauguration): “Faith is taking the first step even when you don’t see the whole staircase.”

This is the faith we need to honor right now, as the second Trump era begins. We find ourselves reaching for a handhold as we step into the darkness: That handhold is love. But what does that mean?

In her Guardian piece, Villarreal pointed out that the mass deportations Trump is planning will be relying on defense—that is to say, military—resources as well as the U.S. Customs and Border Protection agency, which could include the use of military aircraft to transport people back across the border. And suddenly I thought about Woody Guthrie’s iconic song, “Deportee,” which he wrote in 1948, in the wake of a plane crash in California that killed all 32 people on board. Mostly the dead were Mexican farmworkers, being sent back across the border—which meant, according to the media coverage, that they had no names... and didn’t matter.

. . . The sky plane caught fire over Los Gatos Canyon,
A fireball of lightning, and shook all our hills,
Who are all these friends, all scattered like dry leaves?
The radio says, “They are just deportees.”

Woody’s song didn’t bring anyone back to life, but it entered the soul of American consciousness and brought anguish, shock, and empathy into the public—the political—arena. It expanded the public sense of humanity; which remains expanded.

Goodbye to my Juan, goodbye, Rosalita,
Adios mis amigos, Jesus y Maria.
You won’t have your names when you ride the big airplane,
All they will call you will be “deportees.”

Trump is claiming the power and authority to dehumanize whom he wants, e.g., the country’s 11 million “illegals,” whom he wants to turn into deportees. In the process, he is making sure that we remain our own worst enemies. If Americans hate most of the planet beyond their borders—and go to war with it—they are creating the very reality they fear. They are creating, or continuing to create, hell on Earth. Those who see the irony in this—linking, for instance, “Christian” with “white” and “nationalist”—must once again take that first step, beyond the worst of who we are, into a future that values all of us.