https://www.thenation.com/article/trump-hate-speech-violence-against-immigrants
Networks That Air Trump’s Address Are Endangering Immigrants—And The Country
‘Fact-checking’ the president’s hate is not a sufficient fix
by George Zornick
January 8, 2019
The Nation
January 8, 2019
The Nation
Donald Trump speaking at the final session of the Republican National Convention in Cleveland, Ohio. (Brian Snyder / Reuters)
President Trump will address the nation from the Oval Office on Tuesday evening, after every American broadcast news organization granted him the rare presidential privilege of uninterrupted air time on their networks. This privilege was denied to President Obama in 2014, when he wanted to address the nation about comprehensive immigration reform, and the networks’ decision to give Trump the green light came only hours after he declared via tweet that “The Fake News Media in our Country is the real Opposition Party. It is truly the Enemy of the People!”
There has been a fair amount of hand-wringing from the mainstream press
about granting Trump an unfiltered platform to tell lies, as everyone
universally expects him to do. CNN’s chief media correspondent, Brian
Stelter, tweeted the address will “hopefully (be) surrounded by
fact-checking.” Anderson Cooper defended his network’s decision by
saying “It’s not our job to argue for or against walls…What is our job
is to point out when official are making their case disingenuously or
dishonestly, when they’re making stuff up essentially.”
But
Trump’s address is far more serious than a case of misleading people
about basic policy facts, like the net migration flows at the border or
the efficacy of physical border barriers. Tonight, Trump will bend the
facts in service of a years-long racist and demagogic campaign against
Latin American immigrants; he will assuredly dehumanize them as
terrorists, criminals, and carriers of disease, as he has from the very
first day of his campaign in 2015. This kind of rhetoric has led to
violence from both vigilantes and the state, and meekly fact-checking
his numbers is an insufficient remedy to airing Trump’s Fifteen Minute
Hate.
News executives need only to look a few months into the
past to see why this is dangerous. As the midterms approached, Trump’s
lies and distortions about immigration spiked: in late October, Trump
was advancing over 30 falsehoods per day about immigration, according to
data compiled by the Washington Post’s fact-checking team. Many of
these lies advanced the ludicrous idea that there was a caravan of
dangerous people heading towards the US-Mexico border; according to
Trump’s tweets, the “onslaught” of migrants “INCLUD(ED) MANY CRIMINALS.”
That was not true.
But many people believed it. And some people
acted. Robert Bowers, who shot eleven people to death in a Pittsburgh
synagogue on October 27, posted obsessively online about the caravan in
the weeks leading up to the shooting. His specific belief that the
Hebrew Immigrant Aid Society was aiding the caravan in order to foment
violence in the United States appears to have directly precipitated his
decision to shoot up the Tree of Life synagogue; “Screw your optics, I’m
going in,” he wrote online hours before the killings. (Trump also
repeatedly suggested the migrants were being assisted by George Soros.)
Then there was the case of the three men in Kansas who were arrested in
the weeks leading up to the 2016 election for a plot to kill Somali
immigrants in their homes, in order to “wake people up” about the
immigrant threat. At sentencing this year, lawyers for one of the men
asked for leniency because his client had been so whipped up by the
national discourse on immigration. “The court cannot ignore the
circumstances of one of the most rhetorically mold-breaking, violent,
awful, hateful and contentious presidential elections in modern history,
driven in large measure by the rhetorical China shop bull who is now
our president,” they wrote in a sentencing memo.
The immigration
reform group America’s Voice also tracked hate incidents by Trump
supporters and staffers throughout the last presidential campaign,
ranging from shouted slurs to actual violence.
Whether or not
Trump directly incited many of these violent acts can always be debated;
maybe these were people who in some cases would have lashed out anyway.
But there is no question that Trump is creating an atmosphere of racial
hatred and xenophobia, and as it always has throughout history,
violence follows.
Moreover, state violence is an unmistakable
consequence of Trump’s rhetoric. His lies have provided a rationale and
political support for a wave of mass deportations that has ripped
law-abiding families apart, while confining thousands of children to
cages. Some of these children may never be reunited with their families,
while some have died.
“It’s killing people. These policies are
killing people,” said Henry Fernandez, a senior fellow at the Center for
American Progress who specializes in civil rights and has studied
online hate speech. “They’re leading to a level of racialized violence
targeting people of color and religious minorities. This is a decision
to basically broadcast a racist, hateful speech.”
We know that
Trump will continue these outlandish lies tonight; the entire point of
his address is to create the impression of a “National Security crisis
on our Southern Border” that does not exist. His administration has been
advancing the obvious lie that 4,000 terrorists have been apprehended
at the US-Mexico border in recent days, and even Fox News demonstrated
this was false on Sunday, when host Chris Wallace completely
embarrassed White House Press Secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders by
presenting the actual facts. CNBC later found that only six people were
apprehended at the southern border for being on the terrorist database,
and even that doesn’t mean they were actually terrorists, given the
historical unreliability of that list.
Administration officials
have at least been shamed into taking a small half-step back—Homeland
Security Secretary Kirstjen Nielsen now says “the exact number is
sensitive”—but it’s doubtful Trump will feel any such shame tonight—he
will almost definitely make the same false claim.
And that gets
to another problem with airing Trump’s remarks: it’s not just that he
practices garden-variety political lying, but rather disciplined
disinformation, as the Post’s Greg Sargent has relentlessly pointed out.
The key difference is that disinformation campaigns repeat falsehoods
long after they have been debunked, even by friendly outlets like Fox
News. Fact-checking is powerless in the face of shameless demagoguery.
The networks’ decision to air Trump’s remarks on Tuesday with a few
tart chyrons or on-air fact-checks is just not enough to offset the
damage. Trump is unworthy of the airtime.
“We’re now at the
point where if you don’t understand that the government is out of
control, and is aggressively attacking the fundamental values and
institutions of this country, then you’re not paying attention,” said
Fernandez. “I think (the news executives) understand that. I simply
think they have not figured out that the ways in which human rights
violations occur is not just that there are evil-doers, but that there
are institutions—and particularly in a democracy—whose job it is in
times of crisis to stand up, and stand for something. They have not
figured out that they are in this unique moment, where history will look
back and say ‘What side were you on?’”
ABOUT THE AUTHOR:
George Zornick is The Nation's Washington editor.
