Xenophobia is the Trumpian Move
Fomenting fear, not demonstrating leadership.
As was noted in the comments of James Joyner’s post about the terror attack in NOLA, the president-elect’s first move was to go straight to xenophobia and the stoking of anti-immigrant fear instead of acting like the once-and-future leader of the country. This is worth underscoring. It speaks poorly of Trump and his defenders.
Via Truth Social:
As has been noted, the person who drove the truck into a crowd was a US-born Army veteran.
But, Trump is never one to take a measured, leaderly approach to difficult news.
Instead, he prefers stoking flames of xenophobia and trying as hard as possible to foment anger towards a scary Immigrant Other.
Side-bonus is that the crime rate is down, not up. As Police1 reports: Violent crime drops in 2024, with 16% fewer homicides nationwide.
Analysts predict a nearly 16% nationwide decline in homicides, alongside a 3.3% drop in overall violent crime, making this year’s decrease the most significant since the FBI began keeping comprehensive crime statistics, ABC News reported.
The trend builds on substantial declines in previous years: a 13% reduction in homicides in 2023, following a 6% decrease in 2022. These decreases come in the wake of a 30% spike in murders between 2019 and 2020, the largest single-year increase in more than a century, according to the report.
It is down in NOLA as well, as per WWLTV: Crime down 26% in New Orleans as officials highlight safety progress.
But why let the truth get in the way of little fearmongering in the midst of tragedy?
I guess fearful citizens are more pliant.
See, also, Rolling Stone: Trump And Maga Are Desperately Trying To Pin New Orleans Attack On The Border.
Why is Putin-puppet Trump desperate to inflame xenophobia now, even though the attacks at hand are coming from the same kinds of broken, radicalized, US-born military vets Trump sent to sack the Capitol on Jan 6?
This is why:
Tesla replaces laid-off U.S. workers with foreigners using visas pushed by Musk: report (MSN)
Tesla reportedly replacing some laid-off US workers with those holding H-1B visas (Austin American-Statesman)
Tesla replaced laid off US workers with foreign workers using H-1B visas that Musk want to increase (Electrek)
These rumors have sent Steve Bannon, Laura Loomer, and the rest of the extremely online right into paroxysms of fury with President Musk, South Asian conservatives, and First Lady Trump. As a result, MAGA social media has sounded increasingly liberal lately in their paens to American labor — and their Johnny-come-lately critiques of Trumpian oligarchy and Muskian self-dealing (albiet with requisite Republican racism attached).
Bernie types and others on the left fully intend to exploit this row:
Bernie Sanders says Elon Musk is wrong about H-1B visas: ‘Low-wage indentured servants’ (Business Insider)
So rapist and fascist felon Trump is obliged to re-up on his anti-immigrant bonafides, trying to prevent the online MAGA’s rebellion from spilling over from the web out into the general population. He believes domestic terror can refocus his incels’ attention, away from Trump regret and back onto their shared grievance.
When all you have is a hammer, you lack the tools needed to deal with 99.99% of all problems where a hammer won’t help. So you end up smashing things in frustration.
There is nothing new under the sun:
Jim Crow governance is never about advancing the interests of the general populace. Quite the contrary, for if they grow too comfortable they may question why so much goes to so few. If they can be kept miserable and supplied an “other” to blame, they will fight amongst themselves and leave the elite alone.
Meanwhile, Trump and his family have a history of far flung foreign business interests from China to Panama to Indonesia to India and beyond.
The xenophobia thing doesn’t seem to extend to his personal cash flows.
But he has long exhibited expression of deep-seated bigotry in episodic outbursts, so he does have that dark well to tap when opportunity presents.
I can’t believe MAGA is surprised that Trump was on the take and beholden to Musk. Trump has *never* been about anything except himself, so obviously Musk is giving him money to survive his debt crisis, in exchange for control of the United States presidency.
Trump gets money and people visiting him to kiss the ring – which is all he cares about. Musk gets to control things and make even more money and have even more power over the world.
Why are they shocked when the most easily manipulated POTUS candidate in history is easily manipulated?
I fear my initial reaction to this is, “Well of course he did.” Honestly, what else would you expect him to have done? Bring us together in the face of tragedy? How would that profit Trump? And his supporters don’t see a mistake, they see him being strong on immigration. And crime. “If crime is down, like you pointy headed liberals claim, why do I see threats all around me?”
@gVOR10:
Billionaire criming seems to be on the rise.
Whee, four more years of this daily idiocy and ugliness. Good job, America!
(Speaking of ugliness, my first instinct when I see that photo at that size is to quickly scroll by it lest my digestive system explode in some unpleasant way.)
@reid:
I woulnd’t mind seeing far fewer photos of the felon.
I’m resigned that there will be many more, given his penchant for dominating the news cycle with dangerous inanities. But perhaps an analogue might be used instead. Something far less unpleasant to look at. Like a pile of dung, or a creepy clown, or President Xlon.
@Rob1: how do ya think they got to be billionaires? “Behind great wealth lies a great crime”.
If the pearl clutchers are right and they may well be, we are in for a period of political violence. If it comes, much of it will be from the extreme right, but not to discount the ability of ISIS to inspire crazed lone wolf attacks like NOLA. This will test the limits of trump’s outrage machine as the citizenry looks to the presidency to do something. Having Patel at the FBI, Bondi at DoJ and Tulsi as DNI with a charge of retribution will sink his presidency quickly.
Do you think Trump has a conscience?
Having a conscience myself, I know I feel a pang whenever I tell a lie, or speak ill of someone, or do something I know is wrong or more often fail do to something I know I should. These pangs of regret or shame aren’t necessarily physically painful, but they do hurt at some physical or emotional level depending on the scale of what I did. It hurts enough that I remember the pain the next time I am faced with going against my conscience.
Trump, on the other hand, is the most shameless, hurtful, mendacious public figure I believe I have ever witnessed. If he has a conscience, he has managed to subdue the feelings. He certainly doesn’t let some inner voice guide him in the moment or cause him to regret past behavior. This latest xenophobic fabrication about immigration and crime is further evidence of that.
Nevertheless, to get myself through the sadder Trumpist days, I like to imagine that it is not possible to eradicate from oneself all of such a core element of humanness. So Trump does still have a conscience, but it has atrophied to point of near invisibility. Vanishingly small, but of the same mass, his conscience is like a collapsing star about to become a black hole. And with this extraordinarily dense concentration of conscience stuck in the deepest recesses of his self, on that rare occasion when some small sense of right versus wrong gets down in there, it causes Trump excruciatingly sharp pangs of psychic or physical pain.
It’s not much, but it does allow me to maintain just a smidge of my belief in a moral universe.
@Sleeping Dog: Sinking quickly is immaterial. It will continue for 4 years no matter how quickly it sinks. And then voters will vote for “whatever is not this” and the pattern of dysfunction will continue.
Hillary 2028. The slogan: Why the hell not? Nothing else has worked.
@just nutha: 2028 will demand a revered celebrity candidate, probably Taylor Swift.
@Sleeping Dog:
I wish this were true, but it has never worked like this in my life. When things go downhill the general public rallies around whoever sounds the toughest, whoever goes most extreme. Trump and the Republicans are encouraging violence because they know that no matter what kind of chaos they sow, it will benefit them.
@Mr. Prosser: The “Why the hell not?” slogan works for her candidacy, too.
ETA: And the Republicans have now had 3 (well 2 actually) celebrity administrations. (One twice.) Fairness dictates that it’s the Democratic Party’s turn to have one.
@Scott F.:
No, of course Trump does not have a conscience, he’s a psychopath. He is literally incapable of empathy, utterly indifferent to any sort of morality. Like a psychopath. And like a psychopath, but not like a narcissist or a sociopath, he’s deliberately cruel. He revels in humiliating and degrading people.
Google’s AI offers a definition (so you know it must be correct):
This has been my analysis for ten years, even as ‘more measured’ folks who sniffed at my ‘bomb throwing’ kept insisting it was narcissistic personality disorder. Nope. Psychopathy. Textbook.
@Michael Reynolds: I don’t think that psychopathy as NPD are mutually exclusive, but if people are thinking “just” NPD, not psychopathy, yeah, they’d be incorrect.
Then again, I think most of us are closer to psychopathy than we believe we are. I’m not in the “most of us are basically good” camp.
AI and lay speculation is cute for lulz, but actual clinicians with thousands of therapy hours will recognize Donald J. Trump as a textbook case of narcissistic personality disorder. Fits every single DSM-diagnostic criteria, which is exceedly rare and why we frequently code clts with “narcissistic traits” or “antisocial traits” or “schizod traits” or “histrionic traits” or “borderline traits” or “obsessive-compulsive traits” etc. — since the threshold for full diagnosis of disordered personality is not crossed in most of us (who all have traits). Let alone meeting every. single. criterion.
Donald Trump is to narcissistic personality disorder as Joan Crawford is to borderline personality order. As in, you’d use him if you need a teaching example to give beginner students a cartoonishly broad case study — with the disclaimer that most clinicians will never encounter such an easily-identifiable extreme in the field. Textbook, literally.
Trump would most likely be coded as narcissistic personality disorder + antisocial traits. Among whatever else is going on with him maladptively whose symptoms are known in full only to him, Melania and his ex-wives.
The Diagnostic and Statistical Manual has no clinical diagnosis for psychopathy, incidentally. That term, like the “collusion” Trump was also guilty of, is useful for public insight and understanding but has no utility in formal channels and thus cannot contradict actual diagnostic categories.
@Michael Reynolds: NPD and Psychopathy are not mutually exclusive. From Mayo Clinic web site:
From Psychology today:
and
So Antisocial Personality Disorder seems to be the inclusive one, and Mayo defines that as:
Seems to me that Trump fills all of these definitions in pretty much every respect
@Sleeping Dog:
Count me as one of the pearl clutchers. I really don’t see how this all ends without a lot of violence and bloodshed. I actually think almost all of it is going to come from the right and will be at least initially directed at the right. A lot of those people have been promised things for years. It doesn’t matter that the promises were lies, the rubes want what’s “due” them.
@just nutha:
I don’t think that’s going to be the case. The tariffs and the deportations are Trump’s bigly priorities and either of them will nuke the economy. Following that, “invading” Mexico is pretty high on his list along with jailing his political enemies. Either of those things will have a profound effect on the country. Might not be nuked economy bad, but if he pull off any of those four things, shit’s gonna start rolling down hill fast.
I think we’re about to run the clock out on this pattern of dysfunction. The Billionaires think they’ve won, the Racists think they’ve won and the Fundies think they won. All of them have a sizable claim to Trump and he’s trying hard to make that work, but he’s an idiot and a terrible politician, what happens when those three groups go to war. I mean, it’s already starting. What happens when they get sworn in and decide that The Comstock act makes Abortion, pornography and queer people totally illegal. Gonna get wild.
@Scott F.:
If you are filled with self loathing, does the pangs of conscience rise above the background noise? If not, everything is fair game.
Having never seen anything make Trump appear genuinely happy other than adoring attention, and hurting people. I kind of assume that he hates Trump as much as most of us here.
I would pity him if I wasn’t so busy hating him.
Ginning up a mob to do something is his form of leadership. Perhaps the original kind from the days the first batch of monkeys discovered that if they banded together they had their pick of the best fruit trees..and found that following one monkey’s direction led to better results.
I recall Lewis Black once saying, roughly: “Leadership? When you can get thousands of people who don’t have a pot to piss in marching the streets to protest tax increases for billionaires, that’s leadership!”.
@Beth: I’m not sure we disagree. My point is that, sink or not, we’re stuck with whatever Trump is going to do for at least 4 years. Even if his administration “sinks” (however one defined it), what is the kind of Congress we’ve had for a decade or three now going to do to change things?
@Michael Reynolds, @DK, @Gustopher, and @MarkedMan:
To be clear, I’m not remotely interested in an accurate diagnosis of Trump’s specific psychological disorder. He is never going to seek treatment or cure, so what the hell do I care?
OTOH, I am interested in the concepts of Greek mythology where great hubris leads to some commensurate comeuppance, nemesis, or retribution.
@Scott F.:
There’s a reason why it is mythology.
The only close to real case I can think of is Croesus, king of Lydia*. What seems to get other men (they were mostly men) in trouble is too much ambition. Like Caesar who got assassinated. And partly it’s not being able to handle well those whose cooperation you need. Those who manage it, like Augustus, tend to do well enough.
Yes, a lot of such people came to bad ends. Like Mussolini or his German imitator. But absent war or revolution, that’s hardly the norm. Even with war or revolution it might not be the norm. See Stalin, or Assad now safely ensconced in Moscow, and I bet with access to much of his fortune.
The best I can realistically foresee for the felon is an end like Stalin’s: an undignified death involving soiled underwear and substandard medical care. And even that’s not very likely.
* And Herodotus’ chronicle of his meeting with Solon and what was said there might not be accurate. Not to mention the story that he referred to Solon’s advice (traditionally “count no one happy until they are dead”), shortly before his execution by the Persians.
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@Michael Reynolds, @DK, @Gustopher, and @MarkedMan:
¿Porque no los dos?
Personality disorder comorbidity is very possible, there is even a name for the combination of Antisocial Personality Disorder with Narcissistic Personality Disorder: Malignant Narcissist.
Malignant Narcissism examples: Adolf Hitler, Saddam Hussein, Idi Amin.
@Kathy:
We think the goddess Nemesis is fictional, right? Things do not always work out the way they to in myths.
@Gustopher:
You’re onto something. One reason the field discourages “diagnosing from afar” is it can be difficult to find out what’s up until you build rapport in a therapeutic setting: confidential (#1), positive, non-judgmental, as non-biased as possible.
One of my first clients at a certain agency was a woman known for chewing up and spitting out therapists, who typically only lasted weeks or months due to her abusive rage. Reading through their notes, she’d been repeatedly diagnosed with borderline personality disorder.
BPD is overdiagnosed. Sadly, borderline has become an easy label to dismissively slap onto any difficult client. But unlike some other personality disorders considered uncurable, borderline has an evidence-based treatment: dialectical dehavior therapy (DBT).
I was the first therapist she ever had that lasted. I also noted with her early on she didn’t present as fully BPD. This was not odd; psychology is not a hard science, very subjective, norms-based, and inexact. But I was curious to learn why her therapists had no progress with DBT. I figured it was a time issue, or maybe a skills deficit.
Over a year in, she revealed she’d been raped throughout childhood by her brothers and father. Interventions had failed because they’d been treating her for the wrong thing. Her primary diagnosis should’ve been complex PTSD.
We might take a different view of Trump’s “symptoms” if we knew — by speculative, made-up example — that he had spent his youth being trafficked by his dad or abused by his alcoholic brother.
There’s no reason to so speculate. But if some dark secret like this surfaced making Trump pitiable, I’d not be surprised.
@Just nutha ignint cracker:
I’ve admitted that I was uncomfortably close to it for a while, minus the cruelty. Jumping bail allowed me to start getting my head straight, and of course seeing a girl in a window. . . not what would have happened in the joint. I was a lucky boy.