And There Was No One Left to Speak Out for Me

Last week, I indicated that the manner in which former President Donald Trump was increasing the ferocity of his rhetoric about illegal immigrants to stoke fear to get his low-propensity-voter supporters to the polls was smart strategically if loathsome morally.

I was right on both counts.  Although polls are notoriously inaccurate, it has become commonplace in political punditry to observe that it is the polling trends that matter; currently, the trends are seemingly moving toward Mr. Trump and away from Vice President Kamala Harris.  I am stunned and sickened (simply indicating that I’m appalled isn’t strong enough) to see how successful such hateful and deceitful tactics have been.  It is blatantly apparent to anyone willing to employ the discernment of a rock that the vast, vast majority of those seeking to enter our country aren’t “murderers and rapists” as Mr. Trump claimed at the beginning of his political rise, but rather people with the courage to take incredible risks to seek a safe and better life for themselves and their families, doing what any of us would do if s/he had the guts and was in their place; indeed, doing exactly what virtually all of the forebears of all natural born American citizens, except for those of Native Americans and those brought here in chains, did do.  One can be for a firm and fair immigration policy and strong border security – this is a necessary reality; there are criminal elements exploiting our border — without dehumanizing the overwhelming majority of migrants seeking to enter our country peacefully and add to our national fabric:  talking in malignant absurdity of being “occupied” by migrants as Mr. Trump did over the weekend, calling them vermin as he has in the past, echoing Adolf Hitler from a century ago.  But Mr. Trump has to demonize them, because if Americans see these migrants as people – albeit a significant policy challenge, like many others we face (the stress migrants place on our resources cannot be ignored) — and not as a threat, his argument loses its emotive power, and he loses the election.

If Mr. Trump is elected, the MAGA movement will obviously start with illegal immigrants, but by the former president’s past words and deeds one has every reason to assume … that it won’t stop there.  A couple of years ago, we watched a Ken Burns PBS documentary, “The U.S. and the Holocaust.”  I was particularly struck by an observation in the first segment:  that the Nazis themselves didn’t actually begin slaughtering Jews in the early years of the Reich; the Final Solution was developed later, after they had driven the Jews further and further into countries they kept conquering, when there was finally no place left to put them.  The documentary indicated that much of the early hatred and ostracization to which Jews were subjected was instead primarily wrought upon them by their former Gentile friends and neighbors, whose minds had been polluted by a constant stream of Nazi propaganda.  Cue the alt-right media.

MAGAs detest the different, the other every bit as much as they abhor illegal immigrants.  While not even the MAGAs can deport or exile everybody, history is littered with example of despotic regimes’ power to subjugate.  The MAGA movement will move from illegal to legal immigrants of color (Mr. Trump and MAGA Vice Presidential Nominee U.S. OH Sen. J. D. Vance already sometimes fail to distinguish between legal and illegal immigrants on the stump), the poorer, less powerful ones at first.  Then, it will reach for the easiest pickings:  legislating against the practices of American citizens of untraditional sexual and gender preferences and of those seeking abortion rights.  Over time, it will reach for non-Christian American citizens.  It will at some point reach for American citizens of color.  (Although I understand the frustration of some of our non-white naturalized citizens, who “stood in line” to obtain citizenship, at the talk of a path to citizenship for illegal immigrants (the vast majority of whom have almost certainly come across our southern border), I would submit that any of these citizens who vote for Mr. Trump because of his anti-immigration stand, and those African American males reportedly intending to vote for Mr. Trump because of the macho image he presents, are on a fool’s errand; MAGAs will in time come for them.)  Ultimately, MAGAs will seek to silence those white, straight, Christian, tax-paying, law-abiding, American citizens who won’t bow to their fascist impulses, who continue to indicate through word or deed that they believe that the American promise can allow for more than one cultural paradigm.  As all who care are aware, over this past weekend, Mr. Trump declared, “I think the bigger problem is the enemy from within. …  We have some very bad people, we have some sick people, radical left lunatics, and … it should be very easily handled by, if necessary, by the National Guard or if really necessary by the military. [Emphasis added].”  [Translation:  recall that this is the man who was willing to have peaceful demonstrators in Washington, D.C.’s Lafayette Square gassed in the summer of 2020 to give himself a photo opportunity.  Even if you’re a white, straight, Christian, tax-paying, law-abiding, American citizen who (depending upon your vintage 😉 ) perhaps voted for Richard Nixon, Gerald Ford, Ronald Reagan, George H.W. Bush, Bob Dole, George W. Bush, John McCain, or Mitt Romney but will if appropriate be willing to publicly express opposition to Trump Administration policies after Mr. Trump is inaugurated (because he obviously won’t have command of the National Guard or the military until then), you are the “radical left lunatic” for whom the National Guard and the military may be placed on watch.]  (Given that I voted for several of the aforementioned Republican presidential nominees, with the benefit of hindsight regret that I didn’t vote for a couple more, and would now prefer a number of them over of Ms. Harris if they appeared today as they were when they ran for president, the notion that Mr. Trump might well consider me a “radical left lunatic” makes me, as Arsenio Hall used to say, go “Hmmm.”   🙂  )    

At some point, some of the citizens who vote for Mr. Trump this November will say, “This is wrong.  This is too much.  I never intended this.”  By that time, it will be too late.  In this context, the shame will be on them, not on him; he has made his designs perfectly plain.

In the same manner as I was reading a lot of British Prime Minister Winston Churchill’s mid 1930s – early 1940s writings and speeches in the early months after Russia invaded Ukraine – an invasion that Mr. Trump called “smart” – I am currently going back over the writings and speeches of President Abraham Lincoln in the days leading up to the Civil War.  (Fair warning:  I might well be posting a number of Mr. Lincoln’s statements between now and Election Day 😉 ).  On September 11, 1858, during his unsuccessful campaign for the U.S. Senate from Illinois, Mr. Lincoln said in Edwardsville, IL:

“Now, when by all these means you have succeeded in dehumanizing the negro; when you have put him down, and made it forever impossible for him to be but as the beasts of the field; when you have extinguished his soul, and placed him where the ray of hope is blown out in darkness like that which broods over the spirit of the damned; are you quite sure that the demon which you have roused will not turn and rend you? … Our defense is in the preservation of the spirit which prizes liberty as the heritage of all men, in all lands, every where [sic].  Destroy this spirit, and you have planted the seeds of despotism around your own doors.  Familiarize yourselves with the chains of bondage, and you are preparing your own limbs to wear them.  Accustomed to trample on the rights of those around you, you have lost the genius of your own independence, and become the fit subjects of the first cunning tyrant who rises. [Emphasis in Original].”

When I quote Mr. Lincoln, I almost always give him the last word.  However, it seems more fitting to conclude here with a poem we first saw in the United States Memorial Holocaust Museum by Lutheran Pastor Martin Niemoller, who was imprisoned on Hitler’s orders in the Sachsenhausen concentration camp from 1938 until he was liberated in 1945:

“First they came for the Communists
And I did not speak out
Because I was not a Communist
Then they came for the Socialists
And I did not speak out
Because I was not a Socialist
Then they came for the trade unionists
And I did not speak out
Because I was not a trade unionist
Then they came for the Jews
And I did not speak out
Because I was not a Jew
Then they came for me
And there was no one left
To speak out for me”