Former president Donald Trump ratcheted up his dehumanizing rhetoric against immigrants Saturday by saying that some who are accused of crimes are “not people.”


“I don’t know if you call them people,” he said at a rally near Dayton, Ohio. “In some cases they’re not people, in my opinion. But I’m not allowed to say that because the radical left says that’s a terrible thing to say.”

Apparently I’m part of the radical left, because yes that is a terrible thing to say.

Non-paywalled alternate article

“It means you assimilate. You become part of America; America doesn’t become part of you.”

This is a fascinating statement. I'm not sure how much Moreno really thought it through. But something about it seemed weird and I kept looking at it; the second part just didn't make any sense to me. Like I couldn't even parse the language.

I think I finally figured it out: When you become part of America, he's saying, you lose everything else about you. Being "American" doesn't form one piece of your identity. It becomes your entire identity. For being American to be only a single part of your identity, and you to still have other parts, is forbidden, in his mind. That is, more or less, the literal meaning of what he's saying.

Then I thought, maybe I'm reading too much into it. I think he's trying to say that you're supposed to come to America and become part of what's already there; America isn't supposed to change to include part of what you brought with you. You're supposed to change, and America's supposed to stay the same. That's not literally what the words mean, but I think that's more likely what he was aiming to say and he just didn't take the language seriously enough to get there successfully literal-meaning-wise.

I'm not trying to make it more than it is. It's just a weird little throw-away sentence. I just kept looking at it. One of those two things is what he meant. And they're both just... wrong. Like the whole value and purpose of the American story is supposed to be the exact opposite of all of that. IDK. I know they're trying to change the whole meaning of what it means to be American, but it's weird to me that the most perfect distillation of what they're getting wrong about the whole thing from start to finish came from their own explanation of how it's supposed to be.

Edit: I can't let it go. America is the only big country in the world that works the way it does. Almost every country is an ethnic monolith. Italy is full of Italian people, Japan is full of Japanese people, but America is full of white/black/Asian/Hispanic/whatever else people all working somewhat more or less together. And, somehow, America wound up being by far the world's dominant economic / military / diplomatic superpower (for now). To me those two factors are cause and effect. "Diversity is our strength" is very much a literal and serious geopolitical statement. But these guys don't like it being that way. They want to undo everything that makes America a special type of country, for all its evils and all the stuff we do wrong or badly, just because they're too insecure to get by without having a badge that says "my race is special." Fuck 'em. I really don't like it and I don't like them.

Evangelicals: Trump is our president.

Jesus: 👀

Anyone who supports trump would have been a nazi supporter in Germany in the 30s, 40s

Of course he did

The most recent border bill contained everything Republicans said they wanted. Democrats gave them everything they wanted, and they voted no and moved to the right.

Now Democrats' position is the result of giving Republicans what they wanted. This was not Democrats' position 4 years ago.

How long before Republicans' new stance is adopted by Democrats?

He's just gonna keep climbing that ladder, isn't he?

This is the best summary I could come up with:

VANDALIA, Ohio — Former president Donald Trump ratcheted up his dehumanizing rhetoric against immigrants Saturday by saying that some who are accused of crimes are “not people.”

The comment came as he was promising to hike tariffs on foreign-made cars, and it was not clear exactly what Trump was referring to with his admonition.

“This is who Donald Trump is: a loser who gets beat by over 7 million votes and then instead of appealing to a wider mainstream audience doubles down on his threats of political violence,” spokesman James Singer said in a statement.

“He wants another January 6, but the American people are going to give him another electoral defeat this November because they continue to reject his extremism, his affection for violence, and his thirst for revenge.”

Trump and President Biden staged dueling visits to Texas border towns last month, castigating each other for a recent surge in illegal immigration.

He has also pledged to launch an unprecedented deportation effort if elected, pointing as inspiration to a 1954 program called “Operation Wetback” that used military-style tactics to remove Mexican immigrants from the country.

The original article contains 650 words, the summary contains 186 words. Saved 71%. I'm a bot and I'm open source!

I'm not a Trump voter, but this headline is disengenuous. In context Trump was dehumanizing hardened convicted criminals. He also said that many illegal immigrants are criminals (tiny percentage) and that Mexico was emptying their prisons by exporting their convicts to the USA (not even remotely true).

This douchebag says enough insane shit that you don't need to make stuff up to sensationalize. The MSM doing so just further reduces their credibility.

Well, there ARE way too many foreign animals smuggled into the country, but it's not their fault. And a lot of them don't survive. Of course as usual Trump finds a way to be stupid as well as hateful instead of learning anything about the real problem.