Donald Trump has made the Republican Party cruel, xenophobic, exclusionary, and bigoted.
You knew it was coming.
As soon as former South Carolina Governor Nikki Haley emerged as the main threat to Donald Trump in the battle for the Republican nomination, it became inevitable that she would be targeted by him. Any front-runner would do the same thing. But Trump did it with his typical touch.
Last week Trump reposted on his Truth Social account a conspiracy theory that Haley, who was born in South Carolina, was not qualified to be president because her parents, born in India, were not U.S. citizens at the time of her birth. In fact, the Fourteenth Amendment establishes that any person born on American soil is a citizen of the United States and therefore can serve as president.
Last Tuesday, Trump decided to ratchet up the racism a few notches. On Truth Social, he wrote this about his former ambassador to the United Nations:
Anyone listening to Nikki “Nimrada” Haley’s wacked out speech last night, would think that she won the Iowa Primary. She didn’t, and she couldn’t even beat a very flawed Ron DeSanctimonious, who’s out of money, and out of hope. Nikki came in a distant THIRD! She said she would never run against me, “he was a great President,” and she should have followed her own advice. Now she’s stuck with WEAK POLICIES, and a VERY STRONG MAGA BASE, and there’s just nothing she can do!
The second is that this is a bigoted game that Trump is well versed in. In 2011, Trump was the chief promoter of the lie that Barack Obama was born in Kenya and therefore ineligible to serve as president. (I called out Trump in the pages of The Wall Street Journal at the time he did this.) He later implied that Obama was a Muslim and dubbed him “the founder of ISIS.” As recently as a few months ago, Trump, in blaming both President Joe Biden and former President Obama for Hamas’s attacks on Israel, highlighted Obama’s middle name, Hussein, as he has done many times before.
In 2020, Trump did something similar with Kamala Harris, saying in a press conference that he had “heard” that Harris “doesn’t meet the requirements” to be president. Trump has perfected the just-asking-questions posture that promotes conspiracy theories without quite vouching for them. (Harris was born in Oakland; her mother was from India and her father from Jamaica. The source of Trump’s claim was John Eastman, who wrote a crackpot essay in Newsweek challenging Harris’s eligibility and who now faces nine criminal counts in Georgia’s election-conspiracy case.)
Trump, also in 2016, engaged in a racist attack on Gonzalo Curiel, a district court judge presiding over a fraud lawsuit against Trump University. Trump called Curiel a “hater” who was being unfair to him because the judge is “Hispanic,” because he’s “Mexican,” and because Trump wanted to build a wall on the southern border. (Judge Curiel was born in Indiana.) Paul Ryan, then-speaker of the House, rightly said that Trump’s claim was “the textbook definition of a racist comment.” Trump also expressed doubt that a Muslim judge could remain neutral in the case.
During his presidential announcement speech in 2015, Trump signaled the path he was going down. “When Mexico sends its people, they’re not sending their best,” he said. “They’re not sending you. They’re not sending you. They’re sending people that have lots of problems, and they’re bringing those problems with us. They’re bringing drugs. They’re bringing crime. They’re rapists. And some, I assume, are good people.”
IN HIS FIRST RUN FOR PRESIDENT, Trump had awful rhetoric; this time around, he has worse. His words are fascistic. Trump is repeating like an incantation the claim that illegal immigrants are “poisoning the blood of our country.” He has referred to his opponents, whom he sees as his enemies, as “vermin.”
Since the first day Trump stepped on the presidential stage, and in some cases since long before then, he has stoked grievances, resentments, and fears. He has targeted Mexicans; Muslim and Syrian refugees; Haitians, Salvadorans, and Africans; and Black Americans, including the Central Park Five and the Black prosecutors who have filed charges against him.
