Political pundits refer all the time to pols using “dog whistle” language, terms that only their fanatic followers understand.
Donald Trump, though, has tossed the immigration dog whistle into the crapper. He’s saying out loud what he thinks about immigrants and, by cracky, his followers are buying it, too.
He said this past weekend that “immigrants are poisoning the blood of our country.” He didn’t distinguish between legal and undocumented immigrants. He appeared to lump ’em all together.
The irony of Trump’s patently racist epithet is too rich to overlook.
Dude is married to an immigrant. They produced a son, who now becomes a second-generation American. Did Melania “poison” our national blood when she moved here from Slovenia? And is the Trumps’ son, Barron, poisoning the blood by, um, being born?
Of course not. I need to mention, too, that Trump’s late first wife, Ivana, also was an immigrant and they produced three kids. You know their names, as they have been in the news of late.
Still, the hideous blathering from the ex-POTUS does reveal a dark, sinister and evil side of an individual who seeks to become president yet again.
I take particular offense to these remarks because I am the grandson of immigrants. All four of my grandparents came to the U.S.A. from Greece and Turkey. I want to stipulate something here: Turkey is a predominantly Muslim country, but my mother’s parents were ethnic Christian Greeks. Still, as I recall it, Trump referred to Muslim nations as, um, “sh**hole countries.”
OK, I’ll just say this out loud: Donald Trump is an unvarnished dumbfu**!
One of my grandfathers, the one from Turkey, enlisted in the U.S. Army at the end of World War I. Both of Mom’s brothers served in the military, as did Dad, his two brothers and one of his sisters. So, did I, along with several of my cousins. Oh, and Trump? He came up with a tale of bone spurs that kept him out of uniform during the Vietnam War.
Did my immigrant grandparents “poison” the nation’s blood when they arrived here in the early 20th century. No! They enriched it.
I hope you understand a little better just why I detest Donald Trump.
He — not the immigrants he vilifies — is the poison we must avoid.