Trump's Dehumanization Platform
Why it's misguided to defend Donald Trump's dehumanizing remarks on the grounds that they are taken out of context
Donald Trump is no stranger to dehumanizing rhetoric. Sometimes it is direct and explicit, while at other times it is indirect and (at least to some) plausibly deniable. But in both cases, such rhetoric is a key feature of Trump’s brand, and contributes to his appeal to a very large swathe of the American public.
The former president has recently been at it again, this time at a rally in Michigan, where he remarked that twenty-two year old nursing student Laken Riley was “barbarically murdered by an illegal alien animal. Democrats said please don’t call immigrants ‘animals.’ I said, no, they’re not humans, they’re animals." In the same speech, he characterized Brandon Ortiz-Vite, a Mexican migrant who fatally shot his girlfriend Ruby Garcia, as a “monster.”
You might think that this kind of rhetoric is indefensible. But to the faithful nothing that their leader says seems beyond the pale. Soon afterwards, an article titled “Biden campaign faces backlash for omitting full context of Trump's 'animal' comment: 'Another hoax’” that appeared on the Fox News website charged that the Biden campaign circulated a seven second clip of Trump’s remarks that willfully excluded their context, the murder of Laken Riley. The article states:
In Trump's full statement, left out by the Biden account, he said "just a few weeks ago I met with the grieving family of Laken Riley," adding that the 22-year-old was "barbarically murdered by an illegal alien animal. Democrats said please don’t call immigrants ‘animals.’ I said, no, they’re not humans, they’re animals."
The article further states that the Biden campaign was “ripped” on social media for this ostensibly dishonest piece of propaganda, and illustrated the ripping with some examples.
"Why is the Biden campaign constantly jumping to the defense of bloodthirsty illegal alien murderers who killed American citizens? President Trump was clearly speaking of Laken Riley’s killer here."
"Democrats can't even say Laken Riley's name but will get angry when Trump refers to her killer as an animal,"
"Another day and another hoax from the Biden campaign….It's bloodbath part two. Here is the full video where Trump is clearly calling the illegal who murdered Laken Riley an animal. Does Biden think her killer is a good person and not an animal???"
And so on.
Of course, the truncated clip was a politically motivated move, using Trump’s own words to shore up the impression that he is a wannabe Hitler. But it is also true that Trump’s comments were so ambiguous (I assume, deliberately so) that it is unclear exactly who he was characterizing as less than human.
The practice of highlighting real or imagined criminal acts by racialized people is a time-honored and often highly effective method for mobilizing political support.
There are many examples of this strategy in both recent and not-so-recent history. We see it at work in the criminalization of African Americans1 from the nineteenth century onward, as documented in Khalil Gibran Muhammad’a book The Condemnation of Blackness: Race, Crime and the Making of Modern Urban America. Muhammad writes:
In a nutshell, “disinterested” and authoritative white men the world over, from European colonists and anthropologists to American presidents and statesmen, had the same warning to dispatch, according to Hinton Rowan Helper: “Negroes” with their “crime-stained blackness could not rise to a plane any higher than that of base and beast-like savagery.”
In other words, it was common knowledge that African Americans are inherently violent. Criminality was thought to be an ineradicable part of their very nature.
The American ideology of the “Negro problem” was later echoed in the Nazi rendition of the “Jewish problem.” During the nineteen-thirties and forties, the German propaganda machine revived and weaponized age-old tropes associating criminality with Jewishness. As Michael Berkowitz writes in The Crime of My Very Existence: Nazism and the Myth of Jewish Criminality:
The stigma of criminality helped to inculcate the sense that Jews were “beneath respect and abnormal”….The slogan and stereotype of “Jews as criminals” painted Jews as “racial” and “diseased” outsiders who posed a threat to “respectable” Germans but also as men, women, and even children who had willfully chosen to abrogate the laws of society.
The Nazi press made it clear that Jewish people are, like African Americans, innately criminal.
Nazi authors…sought most explicitly to tie the myth of a Jewish race with what they described as the proof of “Jewish criminality.” The entire history of Jewry, they claimed in their nearly interchangeable works, was punctuated by manifestations of the “true” character of Jews as criminals….Jews, they claimed, were not only the main perpetrators of crime; they invented and reinvented it.
What makes the criminalization of members of such groups so insidious has to do with the logic of racial thinking. As I have explained at length elsewhere, racial propaganda appeals to what psychologists have found to be our disposition to essentialize. When we categorize people into so-called races, we not only think of each of these groups as fundamentally different from the others, and arranged on a hierarchy of value, but also believe—tacitly or explicitly—that the members of each of these groups share a unique nature or “essence”—roughly understood as the way members of the group really are “deep down.”
Typically, when one group of people racializes another, the former conceive of the latter as dangerous criminals. Criminality is deemed to be part of their racial essence. Consequently, it is irrelevant that the vast majority of racialized people never engage in criminal activities or violent acts, because it is presumed that all people of this kind have it in them to do so. A few examples, or even a single example, of a heinous act committed by a racialized person can be enough to trigger the criminalization of an entire group2 and is a pathway to their dehumanization as predatory animals or monsters.
Returning now to Trump’s dehumanizing characterization of migrant criminals as subhumans, it’s easy to see that holding up two examples of horrendous crimes committed by migrants goes far beyond those particular individuals and encourages listeners to generalize criminality to the entire group. And if all such people are irrepressibly disposed to violent crime, Trump’s rhetoric perfectly comports with his image in the same speech of a “bloodbath” at the southern border, and his promise to deport millions of “illegals” from the US.
Although I refer to the criminalization of African Americans (and later on, Jews) generally, charges of essential criminality are leveled disproportionately at male members of racialized groups.
The philosopher Sarah-Jane Leslie has an excellent discussion of the psychological and rhetorical aspects of this in her paper “The original sit of cognition: fear, prejudice, and generalization.”