It has been a tumultuous couple of months for me. First, he called me vermin. Then, he told the world to beware because my blood has been poisoned. I was pissed. But the more I thought about it, I was reminded of that old Chinese proverb: “One man’s poison is another man’s meat.” Or maybe it’s “One man’s trash is another’s treasure.” I forgot exactly what it was.
From his poisoned point of view, yes, it is true. They came by boat, my grandparents; they made it to Ellis Island broke and tired from faraway places like southern Italy and Hungary. None of the four sprang immaculately from pure stock in one of those mythical corners of America, one of those red states where white Christians sprout like wheat, and where “woke” America will never ever happen without a fight. None of their journeys were easy, and only two of my grandparents lived long enough to meet me.
Inspired by the extraordinarily patient Chinese who survived an Emperor and Mao Zedong and his mad Red Guards, let’s be more generous than Trump and bless the souls of his true believers, who so desperately clutch their mythology to their chests. For they imagine they are the true red—not really—white and blue Americans. For them, there were never ever any Native Americans living on this land worthy of consideration. Of course, for the moment, they are forced to accept the fact that the few who defied annihilation may now own the casinos they love to frequent. But, speaking of casinos, if there is anyone who knows casinos, it is their hero, Donald John Trump, who sunk a few.
Thanks to emptying out the libraries and sanitizing school curricula, it turns out that the real American winners are those who felt impelled to shed Native American blood after their arduous journey across the seas escaping religious persecution. And, by the way, MAGA knows Taco Tuesday was invented by ingenuous white people in Rapid City, S.D. Not surprisingly, the county went two to one for Trump over Hillary.
Now some insist the recent bout of Trumpian storytelling is yet another “tale told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, signifying nothing.” Sadly, though, this isn’t another Macbeth, not theater by a long shot, but our emerging reality. Trump and his minions are determined to drag us backwards, obliterating the decades of hard-earned progress won with spilled blood in Birmingham and Mississippi, the enduring perseverance of the women’s movement, and their mighty efforts to wrest control of women’s bodies from the sanctimonious zealots. And the valiant struggles of the farmworkers, or the efforts of Mario Savio to democratize college campuses, urging us: “to put your bodies upon the gears and upon the wheels … upon the levers, upon all the apparatus, and you’ve got to make it stop! And you’ve got to indicate to the people who run it, to the people who own it, that unless you’re free, the machine will be prevented from working at all!”
With nary a nod to irony, on November 11, a day that was once designated to celebrate the Armistice of World War One, and now modified to honor those who endured the pain and suffering of war, Donald Trump chose the occasion to offer us a list of those he would exterminate:
When I was in school, Marxists and communists and fascists and radical left thugs didn’t really agree on the time of day. The offshoot factions of Lenin, Stalin, and Trotsky disliked each other more than they did the capitalists, and radical left thugs would easily smash them all. And yet they all despised the fascists.
For many, there was still a significant difference between legal and illegal. Alcohol was legal; pot wasn’t. And poets like Allen Ginsberg found a legal way to broadcast the distortions of the American Dream: “I saw the best minds of my generation destroyed by madness, starving hysterical naked, dragging themselves through the negro streets at dawn looking for an angry fix …” Or sitting in at segregated lunch counters, reminding people that Richard Nixon was a crook.
And, despite the inflammatory rhetoric and tyrannies of the McCarthy era and on through the Cold War, there were far fewer left-wing folks interested in destroying America in the 1950s, ’60s, and ’70s than the great numbers now allied with Donald Trump and his present-day growing right-wing MAGA movement. It was they who viciously attacked the Capitol police, determined to hang Mike Pence, hoping to obliterate the delusionary Deep State: Nancy Pelosi, the FBI, the CIA, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, and Dr. Peter Hotez.
While Donald Trump dedicates his desire to exterminate our vermin to our veterans, he often includes some of their generals, including the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff among their number:
So much for celebrating Veterans Day. On to Thanksgiving Day, when Trump had this to say:
As I thought about the festering rage that prompted Trump to obliterate any Thanksgiving good tidings, I began to contemplate what it is that the former American president has in store for me and so many others in 2025. The New York Times recently made my musings worse not better in an article titled “Sweeping Raids, Giant Camps and Mass Deportations: Inside Trump’s 2025 Immigration Plans”:
Former President Donald J. Trump is planning an extreme expansion of his first-term crackdown on immigration if he returns to power in 2025 — including preparing to round up undocumented people already in the United States on a vast scale and detain them in sprawling camps while they wait to be expelled.
The plans would sharply restrict both legal and illegal immigration in a multitude of ways.
Mr. Trump wants to revive his first-term border policies, including banning entry by people from certain Muslim-majority nations and reimposing a Covid 19-era policy of refusing asylum claims — though this time he would base that refusal on assertions that migrants carry other infectious diseases like tuberculosis.
He plans to scour the country for unauthorized immigrants and deport people by the millions per year.
To help speed mass deportations, Mr. Trump is preparing an enormous expansion of a form of removal that does not require due process hearings. To help Immigration and Customs Enforcement carry out sweeping raids, he plans to reassign other federal agents and deputize local police officers and National Guard soldiers voluntarily contributed by Republican-run states.
Now I know there are many people who will just never believe The New York Times, but it is not like Donald Trump isn’t proudly telling us himself what he is planning. And it is pretty clear he is imagining really big concentration camps, not only for immigrants but a whole lot of other folks as well, enemies all:
Unlike most of you, thanks to my father’s misguided association with the Communist Party, I was raised with the sense that there was always a place for me in a specially built McCarran Act concentration camp. Most Americans have never heard of this act, or its official name, the “Subversive Activities Control Act of 1950,” or its Subversive Activities Control Board:
The act was repealed in 1971, but it offers a chilling look at what Trump might have in mind:
SEC.4. (a) It shall be unlawful for any person knowingly to combine, conspire, or agree with any other person to perform any act which would substantially contribute to the establishment within the United States of a totalitarian dictatorship, as defined in paragraph (15) of section 3 of this title, the direction and control of which is to be vested in, or exercised by or under the domination or control of, any foreign government, foreign organization, or foreign individual …”
The detention of persons who there is reasonable ground to believe probably will commit or conspire with others to commit espionage or sabotage is, in a time of internal security emergency, essential to the common defense and to the safety and security of the territory, the people and the Constitution of the United States … [and] any person who violates any provision of this section shall, upon conviction thereof, be punished by a fine of not more than $10,000, or imprisonment for not more than ten years, or by both such fine and such imprisonment … (Emphasis added.)
You can imagine, should he win another term, how important it will be for Donald Trump to ensure that his next attorney general will do exactly what he needs him/her to do. Can you imagine what Donald Trump will do with language like “The detention of persons who there is reasonable ground to believe probably will commit …”?
As for my fellow potential inmates, on December 22, 2023, The Washington Post quoted claims made by Trump in his recent interview with Hugh Hewitt:
‘They’re coming in from Asia, from Africa, from South America. They’re coming from all over the world …We are poisoning our country. We’re poisoning the blood of our country. We have people coming in … We’re loading up our classes, our school classes, with children that don’t speak the language,’ he said. (Emphasis added.)
No goodwill, even on Christmas Day:
Sometimes I imagine that stupidity dwells and metastasizes in every corner of our republic. How else can ethnic purity, the eradication of sensible immigration and humane amnesty, and unrepentant viciousness be sold so successfully to the masses by the grandson of a draft-dodging illegal German immigrant?
As History reveals, the Trumps have lied forever about their family history:
For decades, they denied their German roots, claiming to be of Scandinavian origin. On October 7, 1885, Friedrich Trump, a 16-year-old German barber, bought a one-way ticket for America, escaping three years of compulsory German military service. He had been a sickly child, unsuited to hard labor, and feared the effects of the draft … Less than two weeks later, he arrived in New York, where he would eventually make a small fortune …
In the mid-1930s, a young Fred Trump went to a party ‘dressed in a fine suit and sporting his trademark moustache.’ Two Scottish sisters were at that same party in Queens: The younger one, Mary Anne MacLeod, was a domestic worker considering a return to her island homeland. ‘Something clicked between the maid and the mogul,’ write Michael Kranish and Marc Fisher in their biography Trump Revealed. When Trump returned that night to the home he shared with his mother, the authors continued, he made an announcement: He had met the woman he planned to marry.
MacLeod … was the child of a fisherman and subsistence farmer, and the last in a family of 10 children born in the village of Tong on the Scottish Isle of Lewis. ‘It was not an easy existence,’ reports Politico. This vast Gaelic-speaking family lived together in a modest gray pebble-dash house, ‘surrounded by a landscape of properties local historians and genealogists characterized with terms like “human wretchedness” and “indescribably filthy.”’
Married to Fred Trump, MacLeod lived a radically different life of fur -coats and 50-foot yachts. In 1942, she became an American citizen and returned only occasionally to her native Scotland, where her son now owns multiple properties. (Emphasis added.)
Donald John Trump has kept alive one family tradition: Like grandfather Friedrich, with the help of a cooperative podiatrist who exchanged a reduction of rent for a diagnosis of bone spurs, Donald too managed not to serve in the military. In an article titled “Donald Trump’s Draft Deferments: Four for College, One for Bad Feet,” The New York Times put it this way:
Back in 1968, at the age of 22, Donald J. Trump seemed the picture of health … But after he graduated from college in the spring of 1968, making him eligible to be drafted and sent to Vietnam, he received a diagnosis that would change his path: bone spurs in his heels. The diagnosis resulted in a coveted 1-Y medical deferment that fall, exempting him from military service as the United States was undertaking huge troop deployments to Southeast Asia, inducting about 300,000 men into the military that year.
More of Trump’s rhetoric from the Hugh Hewitt interview:
[W]hen I talk about people coming into our country is—they are destroying our country. This country is—we have prisoners coming in. We have mental patients coming in by the thousands, really, by the millions, because you take a look. I believe the number will be 15 million people, maybe more than that, by the time this lunatic leaves office. 15 million people, and he’s destroying our country.
The UK Guardian reminds us how President Trump wanted to re-write our immigration rules in 2018:
The president proposed replacing most family-based immigration with a skills-based system after an attempted bombing by a Bangladeshi immigrant in New York last December. He also called for eliminating a visa lottery program for people from countries underrepresented in the US … [and] would limit immigrants like his wife to sponsoring only their spouses and underage children to join them in the US — not their parents, adult children or siblings. Experts estimate those measures, so far resisted by Congress, would cut legal immigration into the US nearly in half.
Exactly what critical skill set besides modelling did Melania possess? As for her parents, the process was called chain migration, or family-based immigration. And Trump wanted to end it. As the Guardian notes:
Melania Trump’s parents were sworn in as US citizens on Thursday, completing a legal path to citizenship that their son-in-law has suggested eliminating. Viktor and Amalija Knavs, both in their 70s, took the citizenship oath at a private ceremony in New York City. The Slovenian immigrants, a former car dealer and textile factory worker, had been living in the US as permanent residents.
Some folks might ask themselves if, in fact, we didn’t have enough of our own home-grown former car dealers? Did we really need to import yet another from Slovenia? As for Melania, AP News reports:
[S]he broke immigration law when she first came to the US in 1996 — by entering the country on a tourist visa and then working as a professional model … Melania Trump was paid for 10 modeling jobs in the United States worth $20,056 that occurred in the seven weeks before she had legal permission to work in the country …
Trump’s mother, his father, and his two wives all came from elsewhere, yet he had no problem ignoring every last drop of his own highly “impure” American blood to trumpet the rhetoric of racial purity.
The New York Times reminds us that Trump has practiced and perfected his racism:
In 2020, President Donald J. Trump gave a campaign speech in Minnesota railing against refugees and criticizing protests for racial justice …
Then, Mr. Trump stopped to address his crowd of Minnesota supporters with an aside seeming to invoke a theory of genetic superiority.
‘You have good genes, you know that, right? You have good genes. A lot of it is about the genes, isn’t it, don’t you believe?’ Mr. Trump told the audience. ‘The racehorse theory, you think we’re so different? You have good genes in Minnesota.’ …
Michael D’Antonio, who wrote a biography of Mr. Trump in 2015, has credited this view to Mr. Trump’s father. Mr. D’Antonio told PBS’s ‘Frontline’ in a 2017 documentary that members of the Trump family believed that ‘there are superior people, and that if you put together the genes of a superior woman and a superior man, you get a superior offspring.’
In 2019, Mr. D’Antonio told The New York Times that Mr. Trump had said that a person’s genes at birth were a determining factor in their future, more so than anything they learned later.
I guess if you put Eric, Don Jr., and Ivanka together you must have one incredibly successful genetic triad. If only someone had taught them how to use a tape measure. Maybe one of them might have noticed that their dad’s Trump Tower apartment was only a third as big as their Trump Organization claimed it was. And, had they paid more attention in school, they would have realized, as Letitia James certainly has, that their father was inflating the value of their real estate.
Now some, of course, have expressed concern about Trump’s clarion call to exterminate the vermin. ABC News wrote:
The comments received immediate pushback … from historians who said his latest remarks had an unsettling resemblance to those of infamous authoritarians …
‘It doesn’t echo “Mein Kampf.” This is textbook “Mein Kampf,”’ Yale University professor Jason Stanley, author of ‘How Fascism Works,’ said about Trump’s comments on MSNBC.
How close is close? Snopes offers these excerpts from “Mein Kampf”:
- “In the north and in the south the poison of foreign races was eating into the body of our people, and even Vienna was steadily becoming more and more a non-German city.”
- “It seemed as if some all-pervading poisonous fluid had been injected by some mysterious hand into the bloodstream of this once heroic body, bringing about a creeping paralysis that affected the reason and the elementary instinct of self-preservation.”
- “[‘The Jew’] occasionally bestowed one of his female members on an influential Christian; but the racial stock of his male descendants was always preserved unmixed fundamentally. He poisons the blood of others but preserves his own blood unadulterated.”
- “The present State, for instance, may continue to exist in a mere mechanical form, but the poison of miscegenation permeating the national body brings about a cultural decadence which manifests itself already in various symptoms that are of a detrimental character …”
One upon a time, politicians watched what they did and said in public, and often they paid a price for either bad behavior or slips of the tongue. But these are the days, my friends, where even monstrous behavior—sexual assault, multiple frauds, serial adultery, encouraging violence, and insurrection—seems to matter not.
Some conveniently see fentanyl rather than bigotry:
Sen. JD Vance, a Republican from Ohio, lashed out at a reporter asking about Trump’s ‘poisoning the blood’ comments, defending them as a reference to overdoses from fentanyl smuggled over the border. ‘You just framed your question implicitly assuming that Donald Trump is talking about Adolf Hitler. It’s absurd,’ Vance said. ‘It is obvious that he was talking about the very clear fact that the blood of Americans is being poisoned by a drug epidemic.’
Then, there is Senator Lindsay Graham, the former Air Force military attorney, who tried to convince us that he cared about law and order. Unfortunately, as The New York Times reports, that was a bit of a scam. And now he has come to appreciate Donald Trump’s lawlessness. He had this to say on Meet The Press:
SEN. LINDSEY GRAHAM: I would say asylum is being gamed. They’re playing – remember the guy who said … ‘I’m not here to leave oppression. I’m here to have a better life.’ Under the Biden administration, the asylum system has become a joke … Ninety percent of the people who claim asylum are denied. So, the initial – they’re coming here for economic opportunity. They’re not fleeing oppression … This is not people running for their lives. They’re running here because the border’s wide open. They think if they get here and make an asylum claim, they never leave …
KRISTEN WELKER: And, of course, the administration’s argument is that they are trying to have tougher protections at the border while also –
SEN. LINDSEY GRAHAM: Well, it ain’t working. It ain’t working …
KRISTEN WELKER: The Biden campaign has accused former President Trump of, quote, ‘parroting Adolf Hitler.’ What is your reaction? Are the president’s comments representative of how you and other Republicans feel?
SEN. LINDSEY GRAHAM: Seventy-six percent of the American people, not Donald Trump, believe the border is broken. They’re worried about fentanyl coming over and killing their kids …
KRISTEN WELKER: Just that language, that ‘poisoning the blood.’
SEN. LINDSEY GRAHAM: Yeah. I’m worried about an outcome. He is right to want – he had the border secured the lowest in 40 years in December of 2020. To the Biden administration, you’re talking about Donald Trump’s language as you sat on the sidelines and allowed the country to be invaded. 172 people on the terrorist watch list have come on your watch. Fentanyl’s killing more Americans … I could care less what language people use as long as we get it right … If you think you’re going to win the debate on illegal immigration by picking a line out of the Trump speech, most Americans understand the game has to change, that we’re under threat, that we’re going to get attacked, that our border has completely been obliterated. So, if you’re talking about the language Trump uses rather than trying to fix it, that’s a losing strategy for the Biden administration …
KRISTEN WELKER: Just finally, is it the position of the Republican Party that African and Asian immigrants are “poisoning the blood” of the people in this country?
SEN. LINDSEY GRAHAM: No, it’s the position of the Republican Party that we’ve lost control of the border, that terrorists are coming, that there’s never been a higher threat to the United States from a terrorist attack from a broken border … There are people coming here who are selling drugs. There are people coming here raping and murdering. There are people coming here trying to have a better life. The terrorists are coming here to kill us. After October the 7th, how easy is it to get into our country through a broken border and kill a bunch of us? To my Democratic colleagues, you’re not going to get away with keeping this border broken. If you can’t commit to securing our border, we’re not going to have a deal.
(Emphasis added.)
Rhetoric vs reality. The New York Times compares some of Trump’s oft-repeated lies about illegal immigration to the facts:
WHAT WAS SAID
‘I read an article recently in a paper … about a man who runs a mental institution in South America … And he was sitting, the picture was — sitting, reading a newspaper, sort of leisurely, and they were asking him, what are you doing? He goes, I was very busy all my life. I was very proud. I worked 24 hours a day. I was so busy all the time. But now I’m in this mental institution — where he’s been for years — and I’m in the mental institution and I worked very hard on my patients but now we don’t have any patients. They’ve all been brought to the United States.’
— during a rally in Nevada this month
This lacks evidence. Mr. Trump has repeatedly claimed that immigrants crossing the border are coming from ‘mental institutions’ and jails. This particular story would seem to offer specific facts behind that assertion, but there is no evidence that such a report exists …
The Trump campaign did not respond when repeatedly asked about the source of this claim. But pressed this year by CNN for factual support for the tale, the campaign provided links that did not corroborate it.
Likewise, there is no support for Mr. Trump’s broader claim that countries are ‘dumping’ their prisoners and psychiatric patients in the United States.
‘We are unaware of any effort by any country or other jurisdiction to empty its mental-health institutions or its jails and prisons to send people with mental-health issues or criminals to the U.S.,’ Michelle Mittelstadt, a spokeswoman for the nonpartisan research organization Migration Policy Institute, said in an email …
This by Donald Trump is fraught with error:
They want America last, ladies and gentlemen. Pushing conflict abroad and distracting from as many disasters at home. Look at home, look at what’s going on and you haven’t even seen them. They’ve allowed, I believe, 15 million people into the country from all of these different places like jails, mental institutions, and wait till you see what’s going to happen with all those people. They’re not coming in just because they like our weather. They like our weather. They’re coming in for a lot of bad reasons.
The Times writes:
Mr. Trump’s estimate of 15 million is not supported by the data.
Customs and Border Protection data shows that U.S. officials recorded nearly eight million encounters at its borders from February 2021, the first full month of Mr. Biden’s presidency, to October 2023.
But even then, ‘encounter does not mean admittance,’ Tom Wong, an associate professor of political science and director of the U.S. Immigration Policy Center at the University of California, San Diego, said in an email. ‘In fact, most encounters lead to expulsions.’
You can check C.B.P. data here, here, and here. It shows that about 2.5 million expulsions occurred under Title 42, a health rule that used the coronavirus as grounds for turning back immigrants illegally crossing the border, from February 2021 until the policy ended in May.
The Times continued: “While Mr. Trump in this instance claimed the country had allowed 15 million migrants to enter, he has at other times predicted that would be the total figure by the end of Mr. Biden’s term.”
According to the Pew Research Center, “The number of unauthorized immigrants living in the U.S. in 2021 remained below its peak of 12.2 million in 2007. It was about the same size as in 2004 and lower than every year from 2005 to 2015.”
The problem has always defied which political party was in power. As long as there is crippling poverty around the world and people are victimized by political and gang violence, they will seek safety and freedom. The need to protect their children will transcend whatever difficulties they know await them. Think back to your own grandparents who endured so much to come here.
It does no one any good to politicize what is, after all, such a basic impulse. Is a Trumpian wall a greater obstacle than the jungle, the gangs, the oceans? Until politicians on both sides understand and appreciate what is driving the need to flee, we will never solve this problem.
Sadly, in Trump’s continuing efforts to demonize these people, imagining them as vermin and not (like his grandparents) ordinary people wanting a better life and willing to work hard to make that happen, he will, in fact, do the very best job of poisoning America.
And it is critical that we acknowledge his success. According to USA Today:
Republican front-runner Donald Trump shows no signs of backing away from his widely condemned and oft-repeated remarks that immigrants entering the U.S. illegally are ‘poisoning the blood of our country.’
One potential reason why?
A lot of likely Republican caucusgoers in Iowa like what he’s saying, according to a recent Des Moines Register/NBC News/Mediacom Iowa Poll.
A poll of 502 likely Republican caucusgoers conducted Dec. 2-7 asked whether several statements Trump has made recently on the campaign trail would make them more or less likely to support him — including his contention that immigrants who enter the U.S. illegally are ‘poisoning the blood’ of America.
The poll found that 42 [percent] of likely Republican caucusgoers are more likely to support Trump for his ‘poisoning the blood’ comments; 28 [percent] said they are less likely to support him; and 29 [percent] said it does not matter. (Emphasis added.)
A final reminder: There is a major difference between those who are prejudiced without power and those with. Republicans hope to erase all memories of slavery, but slavery provides a very clear example of what racial hatred combined with the means and commitment to enforce it can bring.
Donald Trump in his brief before the United States Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia makes it crystal clear he believes in the unchallengeable and supreme power of the Presidency:
Not only does he still profess to be our president, but as Special Prosecutor Jack Smith explains at length in his rebuttal, Trump distorts the meaning of Marbury v. Madison. Smith makes clear that there has always been a difference between what are considered to be “official” acts of a president and other discretionary actions he or she might take, which, like the actions we might all take, can be judged by our courts.
Smith writes convincingly:
The Presidency plays a vital role in our constitutional system, but so does the principle of accountability for criminal acts—particularly those that strike at the heart of the democratic process. Rather than vindicating our constitutional framework, the defendant’s sweeping immunity claim threatens to license Presidents to commit crimes to remain in office. The Founders did not intend and would never have countenanced such a result …
The defendant asserts (Br.1) that this prosecution ‘threatens … to shatter the very bedrock of our Republic.’ To the contrary: it is the defendant’s claim that he cannot be held to answer for the charges that he engaged in an unprecedented effort to retain power through criminal means, despite having lost the election, that threatens the democratic and constitutional foundation of our Republic. This Court should affirm and issue the mandate expeditiously to further the public’s — and the defendant’s — compelling interest in a prompt resolution of this case.
Finally, in my neighborhood, when the insults escalated and could easily end in a fight, there was always one last retort followed by a quick exit: “It takes one to know one.” As for vermin, Donald John Trump, spoiled brat, it takes one to know one.
