Marching Orders for Hate

Marching Orders for Hate

July 23, 2024

The horrific assassination attempt against Donald Trump on July 13 led to calls from leaders of both major parties to "lower the temperature" of political discourse. Trump himself, in the days after the attack, appeared to moderate some of his language. He pledged to rewrite his upcoming Republican National Convention speech to include a message of national unity.

These comments from Trump led some observers to hope the former president had turned the page on his long history of incendiary rhetoric. Perhaps, they hoped, Trump might embrace a political style more respectful of human rights and of the nation's many forms of diversity.

Spoiler alert: That didn't happen. Instead of offering his promised "message of unity," Trump doubled down on his standard talking points attacking people in migration-and anyone who disagrees with his ugly vision for the country's future.

Trump's Speech: No Signs of a New Leaf

In the course of a rambling, 90-minute long diatribe, Trump once again called people seeking refuge in the United States an "invasion." He compared immigrants and asylum-seekers to the fictional serial killer Hannibal Lecter. He repeated his stigmatizing lie that immigrants were coming to the United States from "prisons" and "mental institutions" abroad.

Nearly every word Trump said on the subject of immigration was demonstrably false and dangerously dehumanizing. Trump claimed that immigrants are bankrupting social security -despite the fact that undocumented immigrants pay billions of dollars in payroll taxes every year that they will never receive back, because they are ineligible for social security.

Trump also once again revived his false allegation that asylum-seekers are causing a "crime wave." In reality, the available data indicates that all forms of immigration, including undocumented immigration, are associated with lower crime rates.

A Party Embracing Hate

The other speeches at the RNC were no more reassuring. Tom Homan, who served as Acting Director of Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) during the Trump administration, addressed the party conference despite previously appearing at a white nationalist event. He delivered an incendiary speech calling immigration a form of "national suicide."

Senator Ted Cruz, who also spoke at the convention, echoed Trump's rhetoric of "invasion," while adding some further extremist flourishes of his own. Advocates have pointed out that this same rhetoric of "invasion" has previously inspired mass shootings, including the deadly 2019 El Paso killings that occurred in Ted Cruz's own state.

The new GOP platform that the party unveiled a few weeks prior was couched in the same extremist rhetoric. The document cites "stop[ping] the migrant invasion" as a top priority for the party. Again, this is the same language that far-right terrorists have used to justify antisemitic and anti-Hispanic killing sprees in Pittsburgh, El Paso, and other cities.

A Blueprint for Injustice

In recent weeks, Trump has tried to distance himself from Project 2025-an effort by the Heritage Foundation that aims to provide a blueprint for far-right governance in a hypothetical second Trump administration. The Trump campaign has publicly disowned the project and said it has little to do with their policy agenda.

The speakers' roster at the RNC, however, called these disavowals into question. Tom Homan, the previous Trump official mentioned above, was one of the contributors to Project 2025. He is only one of many people who served in the first Trump administration and are close to the former president who added talking points to the project.

Trump's own prior actions in his first term, meanwhile, suggest that he is in complete alignment with the goals of Project 2025. Kristie De Peña, a Senior Vice President at the Niskanen Center, observed that Trump "implemented 64 percent of Heritage's recommendations just within the first year of his last administration."

A Road Not Taken

The non-stop vitriol we heard at the Republican National Convention this week is not the only path the party of Lincoln could have taken. Trump could have used the occasion to help the nation heal from its grief, after the deadly shooting at his rally in Pennsylvania claimed the life of Corey Comperatore and severely injured two others.

In his prayer to the convention, the evangelical leader Franklin Graham hinted at this alternative course. In his remarks, he spoke with sympathy of the "millions of people seeking refuge and hope in our dry and thirsty land."

Sadly, though, this would prove to be the only time that evening that anyone even came close to acknowledging that asylum-seekers are human beings, who might have sympathetic reasons for trying to escape their pursuers. Every other speaker was lockstep behind Trump's vision of "Mass Deportations Now"-a slogan the campaign distributed to delegates on official signs.

This is not the vision that any political party should be promoting for the nation's future. Regardless of what politicians of either party say, UUSC will continue to promote an alternative vision that centers the rights and dignity of all people. You can help us advance this work by signing up here to learn more, or making a contribution in any amount.

Image credit: Shutterstock (Jeffery Edwards)

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