Good for you, Joni!
"Yeah, I do," she replied. "They are American citizens."
That's the Joni Ernst I made all those phone calls for in 2014 when she was running for the Senate. That's the Joni Ernst I once thought might well be our first woman president. Maybe there's some hope for her yet.
Sen. Ernst and several other prominent Republicans have finally spoken out against the president's racist tweet about four of his harshest critics, women who- like Mr. Trump himself- are well out of the mainstream of American politics. I, too, regard those women as naive, badly-informed, and extreme. But Mr. Trump's comments crossed a line, as they all too often do. But calls for members of minority groups to "go back where they came from" have an old and ugly history in American public discourse, and if Mr. Trump doesn't know that, in some ways that would make his comments even more disturbing rather than less so.
Yes, the word "racist-" like the word "homophobe," and many other such epithets- are overused by the left. And probably the worst thing about that fact is that those words- which ought to back an emotional and rhetorical wallop- have lost much of their impact. People should not be accused of singling people out because of ontological characteristics like race or sexual orientation lightly. It's like the story of the boy who cried "Wolf!" When the wolf finally comes, nobody listens to the alarm.
That might be part of the reason why the cry has fallen on deaf ears when it's been raised in the Age of Trump. Accusations which have unjustly been made about conservatives and Republicans for many years are not taken seriously when a president whose rhetoric is at best often boorish, insensitive and gives voice to the most hateful and bigoted elements of the American population whether or not that is Mr. Trump's intention at the time is shrugged off and he is not held accountable for it in no small measure because the harsh words which most accurately describe that rhetoric have been so overused.
And then, too, there's another problem. Most racists don't see themselves as racists. I really don't think most bigots intend to be bigots. Certainly, they won't admit to it, even to themselves. Very few of us consciously choose to side with evil. Usually, their stereotyped views of minorities are sincerely held. They see themselves as singling anyone out for unfair treatment; they honestly believe the hateful things they say, and really don't understand that they're hateful. They simply see them as calling things what they are. The problem is ignorance, not malice. And when words like "racist" are overused, the people who need to have their ignorance confronted instead are further insulated from understanding how those words apply to them and to their attitudes.
Martin Luther King once said, "Nothing in the world is more dangerous than sincere ignorance and conscientious stupidity." Of all the wise things that great man ever said, that might be the wisest. It's the easiest thing in the world to see one's opponents as simply evil; to caricature them as the devil incarnate,
and fail to distinguish between the lie and the one deceived by it. A large part of Dr. King's greatness was his ability to understand that hate cannot be defeated by hate and that it's the idea, and not the one who holds it, that needs to be defeated.
None of us do a very good job of internalizing that truth these days, whether we're on the right or the left. And the left has more of the blame to shoulder for the phenomenon of Donald Trump than it is willing to admit. When it comes to words like "hate" and "racism," the Democrats and the left have cried wolf so often that when the wolf really arrives, as it has with the Trump movement, people aren't listening nearly as attentively as they should be.
The fear of The Other- whether realistic or not- is one of the most basic of human emotions. It doesn't finally matter to the Americans who latched on to Donald Trump's rhetoric on immigration that there is no evidence that undocumented immigrants commit crimes, violent or otherwise, more often than anybody else. When Mr. Trump singled out undocumented Mexicans and other immigrants as "bringing drugs, they're bringing crime, they're rapists- and some, I assume, are good people," he was speaking out of ignorance. Ignorance is something with which Mr. Trump has always been well-endowed, which is one of the reasons why many of us were so alarmed at the prospect of his becoming president. And his appeal has always been strongest to those whose own ignorance is validated and confirmed by it.
He probably believed every word he was saying. So did- and do- those who have responded positively to what he said. Nobody is being intentionally malicious here. But what Mr. Trump said, and what those with whom it resonated believe, still is racist.
Mr. Trump was very careful in that statement not to accuse all Mexicans or all undocumented immigrants of being violent criminals. He seems to have singled out Mexican-Americans (perhaps immigrants) in the audience as Mexico's "best." He even said that some undocumented immigrants are, "I assume, good people." It's hard for many people to see, though, that even singling some members of
a specific class out is to single out that class. The impression is left that members of that class are to be viewed with greater suspicion than others. And when, as in this case, that suspicion is based on a lie, it is all of the members of the subject class who are victimized by that lie.
What do Ayanna Pressley, Rashida Tlaib, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez of New York, and Ilhan Omar have in common? They're women, they're members of Congress, they're Democrats, and they're pretty "out there" in their leftist political views. But those things describe a lot of people. It just so happens that in addition to them all, these four are also women of color and women whose names (with the exception of Pressley's) have a vaguely foreign aura about them. That, and not their politics, was what caused Mr. Trump's outrageous suggestion that they "go back where they came from."
That three of the four "came from" the United States only underscores the thoughtless ignorance which characterizes so much of what this president has to say.
So yeah. Joni is right. South Carolina's Republican Sen. Tim Scott is right. Texas Republican Congressman Will Hurd is right. It was racist. It was also, as Rep. Hurd added, "xenophobic."
Donald Trump tends to roll that way, in case there's somebody out there who hasn't noticed that.
House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy's attempt to claim that the statement was solely motivated by ideology is contradicted by the fact that the comment was directed specifically to those four women, whom the president supposedly thought had "somewhere else" to "go back to." I, too, am angered by some of the things these women say about our country. Do they "hate America?" That's a conclusion I'm reluctant to draw about any fellow American, though I join the president in deploring what sometimes seems like a disturbingly hostile tone to much of what they say about my country.
Are they "anti-Semitic?" Some of the things they- and especially Rep. Omar- have said about Israel bother me a great deal. On the other hand, none of her supporters published Internet memes of Rep Omar in a Nazi uniform in the act of gassing her Jewish political opponents, or portraying them in concentration camp uniforms as inmates of "Camp Omar." Neither the American Nazi Party nor the Ku Klux Klan, do my knowledge, endorsed any of these women. Mr. Trump cannot make either of these claims, and his enjoyment of the strong allegiance of the intensely anti-Semitic alt-right makes the charge of anti-Semitism an awkward one for the president or his supporters to make about anyone else. And it was not Rep. Omar who came to the defense of the neo-Nazi demonstrators who systematically terrorized Charlottesville, intentionally provoked the violence there, and were responsible for the deaths of three innocent people, equating their activities with those of their victims.
That would be Mr. Trump.
But even in view of how his comment is being received, our consistently tone-deaf president refuses to modify or back off that tweet. It's bad enough that he doesn't know what it sounded like. It's even worse that he seems not to even care.
The House will be considering a resolution condemning the tweet, and rightly so. Fat chance that it will see the light of day in the Senate, though Mitt Romney and several other prominent Republican senators say that they would vote for it. Other prominent Republicans say they "stand with" the president and agree with him that if these women want to leave the country they should.
Which, of course, they don't, and the only person who has even raised the issue is Mr. Trump.
It's hard to argue with conservative columnist George Will, a man I've always admired and admire still more for standing almost alone among journalist on the right in refusing to become a supporter of Mr. Trump: “I believe that what this president has done to our culture, to our civic discourse, you cannot unring these bells and you cannot unsay what he has said, and you cannot change that he has now in a very short time made it seem normal for schoolboy taunts and obvious lies to be spun out in a constant stream... This will do more lasting damage than Richard Nixon's surreptitious burglaries did."
The half-hearted criticism of the president's tweet, coupled with actual attempts to defend what he said, which are the most common response of Republican politicians to the controversy combine with the open and unqualified support of a view to illustrate with chilling clarity the degree to which this crude, uncivil, tone-deaf and- yes- racist presidency has corrupted the party of Abraham Lincoln and Theodore Roosevelt and Dwight D. Eisenhower and Gerald Ford and Ronald Reagan and the Bushes.
The damage that alone has done to America is incalculable. But in the midst of it all, "sincere ignorance and conscientious stupidity" still allows an uncomfortably large minority of Americans to pretend that the Trump administration is something other than what it is: the most direct and powerful frontal assault on our American values since slavery.
And that is not an overstatement.
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