Trump: "We're taking people out of the country — you wouldn't believe how bad these people are. These aren't people. These are animals."
He says the U.S. has "the dumbest laws on immigration in the world."
— Sahil Kapur (@sahilkapur) May 16, 2018
When it comes to demonizing immigrants, the GOP doesn’t mind at all if their “President” Trump says the quiet parts out loud!
Trump on breaking up families: "We have to break up families. Democrats gave us that law. It's a horrible thing we have to break up families." pic.twitter.com/XkpAYuXQpW
— Josh Marshall (@joshtpm) May 16, 2018
The comments were part of a lengthy diatribe before TV cameras, warning that dangerous people were clamoring to breach the U.S. border and castigating Mexico https://t.co/0Or18cPqIj
— The New York Times (@nytimes) May 16, 2018
Jeff Sessions takes the mic, sharing some gallows humor on immigration: "Congress will pass anything as long as it doesn't work."
"If we all get behind our leader we'll get something done this year that's historic."
— Sahil Kapur (@sahilkapur) May 16, 2018
After the "animals" remark, House Majority Leader Kevin McCarthy praised Trump as "a new president that understands this problem" of illegal immigration and the rule of law.
— Sahil Kapur (@sahilkapur) May 16, 2018
This is the sort of thing that makes me feel Trump makes people worse. Some Trump supporters, including many Christians, will contort themselves into defending this notion https://t.co/3Ay7ml3p51
— Tim Carney (@TPCarney) May 16, 2018
Pro tip from someone who’s actually read your Bible: If they can “contort themselves” into defending treating immigrants as other-than-human, they aren’t actually Christians.
Acting ICE Director Thomas Homan nearly starts crying talking about how people are mean to ICE agents pic.twitter.com/MijqG9dlIb
— Aaron Rupar (@atrupar) May 16, 2018
If it came out through a leak or secret document that Trump called people animals, it would be a much bigger story. But he’s open about it. https://t.co/8imwS7CIti
— Michael Grunwald (@MikeGrunwald) May 17, 2018
Absent the context that he was responding to a statement about MS-13
It is demagoguing. Adding that and it is perfectly reasonablehttps://t.co/cXXAJgXIp0— Jim Hanson (@Uncle_Jimbo) May 16, 2018
He was talking about deportations generally. He also routinely talks about immigrants this way. He also routinely claims that crime is driven by immigrants, legal or not. These claims are all false. https://t.co/2QrW2e09sL
— Josh Marshall (@joshtpm) May 16, 2018
Other points worth noting. Obama's deportation policy was focused on violent criminals. Trump's change was trying to deport everyone else too. That's a fact. So your premise & his are both bogus. Also, it's dangerous to refer to classes of people as animals. Leads to bad things. https://t.co/2QrW2e09sL
— Josh Marshall (@joshtpm) May 16, 2018
Trump: "These aren't people. These are animals." Pesky facts:https://t.co/3LOPgT4I4n
— The Upshot (@UpshotNYT) May 16, 2018
For all the instability in the president’s policies, worth noting that racism and xenophobia have been constants in his political life since he descended the gilded escalator and declared that Mexican immigrants were rapists. https://t.co/LHSweQ2lcj
— Woke Progress Administration (@profmusgrave) May 16, 2018
eemom
Dump, of course, is NOT an animal. No animal that has ever walked the earth could conceivably deserve the disgrace of being compared to him.
What comparison WOULD apply? Hmm…. ? A virus, perhaps?
NotMax
Beyond utterly disgusting. The Wannsee Conference redux, only this time held in the open.
Gutter-dammerung.
NotMax
@
Prion, if one must make natural world comparisons.
mark
Here in Washington state it is estimated that 55% – 60% of the agricultural workers are illegal. The eastern part of the state, where most of the agriculture is located, went heavily for Trump. They are currently experiencing a labor shortage. Funny how they seem to think that these laws don’t apply to themselves.
opiejeanne
I am naive, I guess. I thought we’d already hit the bottom of what he’s capable of, but he and his cronies seem determined to dig straight to hell and take us with him. I am appalled and really getting worried.
My niece married a young man whose grandparents came from Mexico, probably without papers. He gets accused of being undocumented and threatened fairly often these days, and he says it’s much worse since Trump.
opiejeanne
@mark: We live just outside Seattle, near Redmond. Several family members of those ag workers were guests at my daughter’s wedding two summers ago, undocumented. My niece’s wedding had a couple of undocumented people as guests and she was terrified that one member of her father’s family was going to have ICE show up on the doorstep; that person asked the groom if he was marrying her to get a green card, the idiot. I don’t understand people like this.
mark
I live in Redmond, just down the street from MicroSoft, next to Idylwood Park.
frosty
@mark: Same thing is happening on the Eastern Shore of Maryland. No visas for the crab pickers. So the watermen can’t go out since there’s no place to sell their catch. Crab meat prices might quadruple this summer so fewer retail buyers.
The Eastern Shore voted for Trump.
fuckem.
Aleta
Trump on breaking up families: “We have to break up families. Democrats gave us that law. It’s a horrible thing we have to break up families.” Monstrous criminal. Press needs to start telling the truth. They’re on his list.
M. Bouffant
@opiejeanne: We ain’t heard nothin’ yet. Wait until the mid-terms are in full swing. And then 2020, whether or not Trump’s running.
mark
@frosty: I saw that on the news. They appear to think that the immigrant thing is just some sort of an anomaly and once Trump gets a handle on things there will be lots of immigrants to help them out. A major disconnect from reality.
hitchhiker
It’s hardly bedtime here on the left coast. As mark says above, the Trump-loving rural folk in the eastern part of WA are stuck. Bob Goodlatte’s got a bill he can’t sell that involves requiring temporary farm workers to out themselves and risk being deported by his insane leader.
But it won’t pass, so things will go on as before. Farmers wondering where all their laborers are, undocumented workers hoping there won’t be raids, the guy in our White House waving his dick wildly around while we wait for someone to haul his orange butt off to jail.
Platonailedit
Late Night Horrorshow has become that rotating BJ thingy, hasn’t it?
Aleta
I’m guessing that The GOP doesn’t care about hand-picked crab (which is better than machine-picked because the machines break up the meat). I’m guessing their attitude toward the historic busineeses is “take out loans, buy more and bigger machines, the reduced quality doesn’t matter.” Typical GOP imo.
Most of the larger operations probably already have an extraction machine or two. They just wouldn’t use them much unless a harvest was bigger than their labor supply. The machines leave more shell in, I believe. The flavor is not as wonderful. It’s really depraved imo; they are forcing these businesses to invest big or fail. The small operations, just like the past small farms in the midwest and small dairy farms in the east, will be squeezed out. I’m just guessing though–don’t know enough.
Radiumgirl
@mark: The disconnect comes from relying on right-wing propaganda outlets for their information. It’s a funny thing about reality; it doesn’t conform to your distorted views, it simply rolls over you.
JGabriel
@eemom:
Black Mold / Toxic Mold.
Amir Khalid
Jefferson Beauregard Sessions Eye Eye Eye’s “stand with our leader” remark needs to be auf Deutsch:
Wenn wir alle mit unserem Führer dieses Jahr stehen, werden wir etwas erledigen.
@mark:
With Trump’s followers, we’ve seen over and over again that it’s not merely failure to see his faults; it’s willful blindness. Better that than admitting that they voted for him because they thought his faults made him one of them, and all it got them was fucked over good and hard.
JGabriel
@opiejeanne:
We’re not even close to the bottom of the sliminess that Trump is capable of. Trump wants to be dictator for life. He won’t succeed, but he’ll sink to any level trying – including concentration camps, cancelling elections, and starting a war just to grant himself emergency wartime powers – if we let him.
Trump is a power-hungry narcissist with no personal restraints. He’s a disgusting piece of scum, and he will sink to lower and lower depths, dragging the country down with him, until he’s impeached and removed from office, or until he loses re-election so decisively that it’s beyond being swung by election-rigging from the Russian government and/or Republican officials.
TriassicSands
As written that statement is misleading. Those people are, in fact, American Christians. After all, is “Christianity” some textbook definition or what people actually practice. The dominant “American Christian” voices belong to people who can contort themselves into defending all sorts of horrors. Calling immigrants “animals” is one of the least serious contortions.
TriassicSands
After watching and listening to Trump for a few months, I decided there is no “bottom.” He’s a man capable of almost anything and I don’t exclude homicide. I understand your concerns; they’re well-founded.
TriassicSands
@eemom:
A virus has no “intention.” It isn’t aware.
Wait, you may have something there.
mark
@TriassicSands: I used to think that Bush was as low as the Republicans could sink. With the rise of Trump I have reached the same conclusion as you and JGabriel have, there is no bottom as to what they will do. We’re seeing the worst of what humanity can be.
Chet Murthy
@mark:
Aktion T-4 anyone?
Link
Amir Khalid
@TriassicSands:
Well, there’s what Jesus calls his followers to be, as described in the Bible (the textbook definition, if you will), and then there’s what some self-proclaimed Christians choose to be. And there is undoubtedly a difference between the two.
Bobby Thomson
@Aleta:
They consider that a feature, not a bug.
NorthLeft12
Let’s recap; Trump starts campaign declaring he is a racist and he is going to deport all the criminal immigrants…which is every undocumented immigrant.
Continues to double down on this throughout the campaign [over one year].
Wins Presidential election.
It is what it is. You have a lot of racists or people who don’t care in your country.
lowtechcyclist
Terry Pratchett had one of his Discworld characters say, “sin is treating people as things.” In 47 years as a Christian, that’s easily the most perceptive thing I’ve heard about sin.
So when Trump starts referring to people as animals, and everyone just goes along, I concur with Anne: if you go along with this, you are not a Christian. You do not serve the Lord. Period. End of story. If you have known the Lord, how could something like this ever be okay to you? It can’t.
But I’m not going to hold my breath waiting for any pushback from Trump’s evangelical supporters. I already figured out that most of them didn’t know the Lord.
MattF
Speaking of the RW evangelicals. I’ve been reading about historical messianic movements, and one of the ‘features’ of these movements is a specific heresy called ‘Antinomianism‘:
So, you see, it may not be that old standby, hypocrisy. It may be that the RWers believe they have been freed from the ‘standard’ moral laws. ‘End Times’ are so special.
Anne Laurie
@lowtechcyclist: Ah, yes, as exemplified by Pratchett’s professional assassin, Mr. Tea-ah Time-ah: “He saw things differently than other people, and part of that was seeing other people as things.”
Who comes to a bad end, when he makes the mistake of misunderstanding a weapon that will only kill… monsters. I could certainly see something like that happening to Mike Pence…
(From HOGFATHER, aka ‘Dicken’s A Christmas Carol with the sentimentality stripped out.’ Red blood on white snow, that’s the only true meaning of [the solar return festival] I know.)
oatler.
@MattF:Ever notice the favorable “ethical non-monogamy” articles in RW sites? Almost like they had a fuhrer to defend.
JeanneT
Pratchett also addressed the sin of ‘people as things’ extensively in Carpe Jugulum, in which the bad guys are literally vampires. One of the best novels about religion ever.
Matt McIrvin
@MattF: They’ve got a concept called dispensationalism, which is that (among other things) the bedrock moral laws of the universe literally change from one epoch to another. What’s fundamentally right and wrong was different in the days before Jesus than it was after Jesus, and it’ll be different in the End Times again. Jesus can come back as a mass-murdering warrior tyrant with laser beams coming out of his eyes, and it’s all good and proper because that’s just fine for that dispensation.
Matt McIrvin
@JGabriel: Fundamentally, it’s not the sliminess of Trump. It’s the sliminess of a large fraction of American voters, including an ample majority of white people–a minority, but still enough to swing a national election under the right conditions.
They’ll be around after Trump. Rep. Steve King (NSDAP-Iowa) is the pure form. Their core demographic is shrinking as a fraction of the general population, but they become increasingly radicalized and tyrannical in their preferences as that happens. And they may recruit more whites, as whites become increasingly worried that they won’t be a majority forever. Their end goal is the disenfranchisement, deportation or extermination of enough non-white people that they can retain a controlling majority. If these impulses can’t be kept down somehow, the endpoint is a genocidal race war, something like Bosnia or Rwanda on a massive scale, perpetrated by crazed white people.
Citizen_X
Shut the fuck up, apologist for Russian penetration.
“Law,” according to these people, is immigration law and no other. Oh, and people of color obeying police instantly, on pain of death.
Jack the Second
Unpopular opinion puffin time.
All those poor, Trump-voting, undocumented-immigrant-employing small (or sometimes not) farmers?
They weren’t paying their workers fair wages.
Sometimes there are complex reasons for it and sometimes they’re just assholes, but double-fuck-em in any case. Our agricultural system can’t continue to be built on paying second-class non-citizens an unfair wage.
Lee
The NYT just can’t help themselves. “Trump calls some unauthorized immigrants animals”
Vor
“I like your Christ, I do not like your Christians. Your Christians are so unlike your Christ.” -attributed to Gandhi
The Holocaust museum is right there in DC, showing what happens when people start viewing their fellow man as lesser, as animals. I wonder if Trump has ever visited.
Matt McIrvin
@Citizen_X: “Rule of law” in the right-wing lexicon means white supremacy. It has nothing to do with any actual laws, immigration or otherwise–these are people who will tell Native Americans to go back where they came from.
The Other Chuck
@eemom: Viruses have one job, they do it well, and apparently we owe a great deal of our evolutionary apparatus to their particular mechanisms of tinkering around with our DNA.
Toxic mold is about right for 45. For the Republicans in general, there’s always the old standby: cancer.
Frank Wilhoit
Historically, the “animals” rhetoric has exactly one purpose, which is to provide deniable cover for “real Americans” to take direct action and to signal to them that they will not be prosecuted for doing so.
CliosFanBoy ne Woodrowfan
@Vor: a short walking distance to the Smithsonian African-American and American Indian museums with their own lessons on what happens when people become things…
The Other Chuck
@oatler.: Polyamory is a thing across political spectra, with plenty of relationships forming long-term-committed triads and other “shapes”, as well as selfish manipulative hedonist assholes who just want to justify rampant cheating or give a catchy label to the otherwise pedestrian “fucking everything that moves”. It’s just the usual correlation of RWNJ’s to selfish assholes, and their usual trend of co-opting liberty to go be libertines.
rikyrah
they are evil people.
period
The Other Chuck
@Vor:
Gandhi was Oxford-educated. I don’t think he’d talk about “your Christ” like he’d just stepped out of the bush and heard about him just last year.
CindyH
@The Other Chuck: while this quote may not be from Gandhi, I don’t see anything about “your Christ” as indicating that he just heard about it. I think he (or whoever actually said it) meant “your Christ” as in something different from his own belief.
schrodingers_cat
@CindyH: Agreed.@The Other Chuck: Gandhi didn’t go to Oxford, he studied law in England. It was Nehru who went to Harrow and then Cambridge.
Calouste
@Jack the Second:
It’s been like that for 400 years, it’s one of the cornerstones of American society, economy, and culture. It’s one of this regime’s goal to make that second-class more formal again, see their plans for the Dreamers, who would be in limbo for a decade where the smallest mishap could see them deported.
The Pale Scot
@eemom:
A Protist, like Malaria, or better yet, that brain eating amoeba that lurks in southern swamps and lakes, any static pool of water, static such in the manner of Trumpets brain wave patterns
BretH
“The 400 (something) agents and ICE officers whose hearts stopped beating…”
He would have you think that officers enforcing immigration laws are routinely killed. Best quick research I could do shows that since 2003 30 Border Patrol agents have died – from a mix of actual confrontations and car/motorcycle accidents. Hard to tell how many other officers were killed enforcing customs laws (like agents inside Mexico), and harder still to find any reports of officers inside the US killed or injured in immigration roundups.
As Charles Pierce says – these really are Mole People.
The Pale Scot
@lowtechcyclist:
I always hated that medieval idea, I don’t serve, I walk with Christ. If you serve a deity, ultimately you’re just a stooge for some nut waving a Bible around
The Pale Scot
@MattF:
That’s not something fundies keep in the shade, It’s major tenet of their theology, good works don’t mean diddly, all you have to do is “Proclaim JC as your lord and savior” everytime you get caught doing something reprehensible. No penance necessary.
They’re not Christians, they’re Yahwehians or Jehovahites, ’cause for them it’s all about ignoring the Gospels and focusing on the Old Testament tribal purity laws.
J R in WV
Just because fundamentalist pseudo-christians have to believe that faith matters and works do not, because they never do any ‘works’ for anyone as Christ would describe them, doesn’t make that part of actual Christianity.
Good Muslims are better Christians than prosperity gospel fundamentalists are. Because part of being a good Muslim is doing charity — just as it is part of being a good Christian. Their Holy Bible spells out in great and emphatic detail that works are as essential to being a Christian as faith is, the two go hand in hand.
If there is a Lord God, and if Christ is his son, all these fundamentalists are doomed to hell, and Possum Queen will be in the first rank of those marching down the highway to hell.
I personally try to do good works, although I have never been a believer. I got in trouble in early days of Sunday School for asking hard questions of the Sunday School teachers that they had no easy answer for, a habit I never broke.
opiejeanne
@mark: I’m in Woodinville, on Hollywood Hill. If I walk through the little woods behind the house across the street I come out in Redmond.
Coldie
Balloon Juice could do without the no true Scotsman fallacy regarding Christianity. This is What the vast majority of Christians in America have stood for for my entire 40 years on this planet. This is what Christianity represents, stop sugarcoating it. The Bible condones a lot worse shit than what we are seeing now, christianity is ultimately a force for absolute evil on our planet. It also is in a complete lie and fabrication. As a religion, it has no good intentions. These people are absolutely Christians.
Peggy Noonan's Conscience
@eemom: Hagfish
artem1s
@NotMax:
Pretty telling that even Heydrich and Eichmann knew that what they were doing warranted secret meetings with all notes destroyed afterwards. But this administration brays their banal evil all over the airwaves and social media daily.
Amir Khalid
@The Other Chuck:
The Mahatma was adding to his point about Christian hypocrisy in embracing Jesus as a sort of deity but spurning his example in their daily lives.