By Hanna Grissel
The Trump campaign admitted that Melania Trump’s plagiarized speech was just that, plagiarized [cnn.com]. What’s distasteful is the way the critiques were handled in the first place. Trump’s campaign and right-wing media relentlessly opposed the idea until the speechwriter came forward. Did a single supporter dare to fact check it her- or himself?
Maybe, who knows; what I know is that this response by the Trump campaign and the conservative sect is all too typical. The case of Melania Trump’s speech fraud and, too, the support of her immigration is a metaphor for a much larger issue at hand.
The issue seems to stem from the disregard of evidence. Sara Ahmed wrote, “The removal of evidence of something is evidence of something” [feministkilljoys.com]. The disregard of evidence that the speech was plagiarized is evidence that conservatives are willing to hide the wrongdoings of their people. Or at the least vehemently stand behind corruption in way of opposition to the left.
What the support of her immigration (her being a white woman), in comparison with the egregious fear mongering against Latino persons and their immigrant statuses in this country, coming from the Trump campaign shows us is that there a double standard.
At this point, any revival of evidence seems to me to be beating a dead horse; those who will disregard it show us something. However, I’ll beat it for the sake of this argument. The argument from the right seems to stand that illegal immigrants shouldn’t be granted citizenship. So everything is about legal status?
The logic in this case works like this: If you’re legal and you go about citizenship legally, you should be protected. If you’re illegal, you should be deported. OK, sounds sensible for someone who believes in America’s right to protect the land that we stole.
What (else) disregards logic is the insane amount of inflammatory rhetoric the Donald is spewing about Latinos. Apparently, this is a good business tactic to get people behind the deportation of illegal immigrants. What he is (definitely isn’t) forgetting is that this rhetoric stigmatizes all Latinos. This rhetoric insights violence against said persons, not just illegal immigrants.
Like in the case of two brothers in Boston who ruthlessly brutalized a homeless Latino man, during which time they spewed ethnic slurs. Afterward saying they were propelled by the words of reality TV personality Donald Trump [bostonglobe.com]. What’s absolutely despicable is that Trump defended these men and other violence (all hate crimes) by claiming his constituency are a “passionate” people with a “love for the country.” [vox.com]
Nonetheless, the conservative sect bands behind the reality-television star to remind everyone how not racist he is. Speechwriter for Richard Nixon and current political commentator Ben Stein went on FoxNews to talk about how America needs to be a gated community and how Trump will do that for us. He went on to say, “I have not heard a racist word out of that man’s mouth. He wants a peaceful, calm America, he wants a strong military.” [mediamatters.org]
I wonder if Stein realizes peaceful is an antonym of military. What you can see here by him is a complete dismissal of evidence to the contrary. Once again, his constituency is willing to hide the wrongdoings of and protect their hopeful despot. It might be because they don’t value his racism as wrongdoing in the first place.
As we learned from Hitler, when people experience economic instability, when they perceive a loss in social hierarchy (as many white supremacists do today), blaming the other and creating fractures will allow for an authoritarian to come into power. The Mexican President Enrique Peña Nieto, stated analogously in an interview, “That’s the way Mussolini arrived and the way Hitler arrived.” [excelsior.com]
