photo by Hannah McKay, Reuters —
Reacting to images of US government forces tear gassing children in diapers, pundits have accused President Trump of playing to his narrow base. But I think he’s playing to a far wider audience.
Progressives are endlessly amazed at our president’s inability to read, write, and pay attention to the basic work of governance. But we underestimate how Trump’s intelligence exceeds our own in one key respect: the mastery of raw power, and how humans fundamentally respond to it. Not only is he smarter than we are, he is nakedly willing to use this lizard-brain intelligence to attain whatever goals he seeks. His core belief is that the blunt use of power renders all other forms of intelligence – indeed, all objective fact – superfluous. History teaches that societies ruled this way tend steadily towards self-destruction and collapse. But in the short run, Trump’s style of governance can be quite successful.
Thus on immigration: Trump deeply believes that high immigration flows are harmful to “America,” by which he means the immediate interests of European-American children and grandchildren of immigrants. For those ancestors, America shone as a beacon of opportunity, a face of hope symbolized by the Statue of Liberty. The actual deeds of the US as a global superpower may be the subject of a more complicated conversation. But the ideal of America as the global lighthouse of freedom has persisted undimmed.
That, frankly, is a problem, because it draws people to our shores in greater numbers than our president – and the many constituents who share his views — would like. And he knows this. Better than most of us, he understands the power of advertising and publicity, both good and bad. To stop immigrants from coming, he has to make America perceived as a worse option than staying where they are. And if “where they are” is a place wracked by death squads, beset by gang violence, plagued by sexual and gender violence, and unpoliced by any meaningful governmental authority, then the international face of America must fundamentally change.
The rebranding campaign began shortly after his inauguration. Nicholas Kristof reported that the official photo in embassies around the world, that had long shown the beaming visages of many Presidents, was replaced by Trump actually scowling. Since then Administration policy has passed through an escalation of steps and stages, from General Kelly’s initial “get tough” memo in 2017, the revocation of DACA, the infamous family separation debacle, the children’s detention camps, the militarization of the southern border, up to the tear-gassing of children in Tijuana.
But Trump’s goal, and the most enduring “face” of the new America he wants to leave as his legacy for generations to come, is the Wall. No longer will it be the Lady with the Lamp, but a blank inhuman colossus of concrete – high, uncaring, impenetrable. A face with no face, offering no hope.
Fox pundits express disgust that Honduran mothers would thrust their diapered children against our gates. But we don’t get it. These caravan parents are seeking to make good on a generations-old offer. They persist in the belief that if they can only prove with the most persuasive evidence they have – the tender flesh of their kids — that they are in fact the “huddled masses yearning to breathe free” carved on that stone tablet, that Donald Trump will reveal himself to be an American after all. That we will open the Golden Door. Last week, the demand to “breathe free” was answered with tear gas. And Lady Liberty is weeping.
