Trump's Dog Whistles About Migrant Farm Workers
Trump Echoes Scientific Racism AGAIN With Remarks About The Good ‘Backs’ Of Migrant Farm Workers
In today’s episode of Trump Is So Racist He Sounds More Racist When He’s Trying To Sound Less Racist, President Donald Trump on Tuesday appeared to soften his attitude towards immigrants — well, certain immigrants — and said his administration will implement new rules and regulations on migrant farm labor. Basically, he appears to be coming to glory on how his Gestapo-style crackdown on undocumented migrants has arguably done more harm than good, especially as it applies to America’s farms, which are grappling with a workforce decline since Trump’s campaign promise to prioritize criminals who come into the country illegally spread immediately (and predictably) to migrant workers who are just trying to make a living and are not criminals at all.
“We’re taking care of our farmers. We can’t let our farmers not have anybody,” Trump said on a phone call with CNBC.
Now, Trump could have and should have stopped right there. He came dangerously close to sounding like a decent, empathetic human being — which should have been the first clue that things were about to go left, and by “left,” I mean far-right. So far to the right, in fact, that he started dog whistling about people who live in the “inner city” and ended his remarks sounding like he was preparing migrant farm workers for an antebellum auction block.
“These people—you can’t replace them very easily. You know, people that live in the inner city are not doing that work,” Trump said. “These people do it naturally, naturally.”
“I said … to a farmer the other day, ‘What happens if they get a bad back?’ He said, ‘They don’t get a bad back, sir, because if they get a bad back, they die.’ I said, ‘That’s interesting, isn’t it?’” Trump continued. “These are, in many ways, very special people.”
Yes, that’s very interesting, Trump — if your farm is actually a plantation.
Look, even if Trump’s probably imaginary conversation with a random farmer actually happened, he took the wrong message from it. Sure, it is true that undocumented migrant workers often take difficult, physically demanding jobs that most Americans won’t do — and often for far less pay than the job is worth — but a sharecropper-style labor system is certainly not something to boast about. (I won’t even get into him basically calling “inner city” people lazy, how “inner city” has always been code for Black people, or how inner city people didn’t have literally anything to do with the topic at hand. Unfortunately, I just don’t have the bandwidth to sort through all of y’all’s president’s white supremacist musings in one sitting.)
Look, MAGA supporters are going to say people are reaching by calling Trump’s words a callback to slavery, but that’s because they prefer their Black history either severely whitewashed or done away with altogether. Of all the numerous false justifications white southerners leaned on to whitesplain slavery on a (non)scientific level, one of the most popular was the notion that Africans were genetically and intellectually inferior, but physically stronger and more enduring, which made them perfectly suited for slave labor.
It’s worth noting that this is far from the first time Trump has dabbled in scientific racism regarding Black and Hispanic migrants. Last year, while he was still campaigning for his second term, Trump, completely unprompted, started making wild and egregiously racist claims that migrants are predisposed to commit murder and other violent crimes because they have “bad genes.”
Here’s what I wrote about that last October:
Besides the fact that Trump is continuing to lie about migrants causing a surge in violent crime in America — an often-repeated assertion that is not remotely supported by violent crime data from any reputable database — the white nationalist who is dangerously close to being elected to the White House for a second time is echoing the eugenics movement. He’s echoing the Ku Klux Klan’s belief in the genetic superiority of white people. He’s echoing Nazi Germany. (This is as good a time as any to remind you that JD Vance once compared Trump to Adolf Hitler before he became the racist Robin to Trump’s bigoted Batman.)
Mind you, this isn’t the first time Trump has resorted to the kind of rhetoric that had former KKK Grand Wizard David Duke accusing him of jacking his political style a few years ago. Back in the early stages of his first presidential run — around the time when he was generalizing Mexican immigrants as “rapists” who are “bringing drugs” and “bringing crime” into the U.S. — he baselessly claimed Mexican migrants were bringing “tremendous infectious disease” to the U.S., which is easily comparable to a 1941 Nazi propaganda poster that read, “Jews Are Lice: They Cause Typhus.” More recently, he said that immigrants are “poisoning the blood” of the country, which is about as neo-Nazi-ish as a person can sound without just flat-out shouting “Heil Hitler!”
It’s no surprise that the president went out of his way to defend Sydney Sweeney’s controversial American Eagle ad that many believe served as a subliminal shoutout to white supremacist “good genes” ideology.
This is yet another not-so-subtle reminder that we’re not calling Trump and his MAGA minions Nazis white nationalists and white supremacists for no reason; we’ve given them these labels because they keep giving us reason to.
SEE ALSO:
Trump Memo Doubles Down On Anti-DEI Requirements For Federal Funding
Trump Echoes Scientific Racism AGAIN With Remarks About The Good ‘Backs’ Of Migrant Farm Workers was originally published on newsone.com
