{"id":3797,"date":"2016-06-16T12:55:02","date_gmt":"2016-06-16T17:55:02","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/napervilledemocrats.org\/ntdo\/?p=3797"},"modified":"2016-06-16T13:07:22","modified_gmt":"2016-06-16T18:07:22","slug":"who-are-trumps-us-and-them-today","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/napervilledemocrats.org\/ntdo\/who-are-trumps-us-and-them-today\/","title":{"rendered":"Who are Trump’s “Us” and “Them” Today?"},"content":{"rendered":"
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\"\u201cUs<\/a>

\u201cUs versus them\u201d has been Donald Trump\u2019s theme since the beginning of his candidacy. But the more often he applies it, the more slippery and opportunistic those categories seem.
PHOTOGRAPH BY DAMON WINTER \/ THE NEW YORK TIMES \/ REDUX<\/p><\/div>\n

It\u2019s hard for Trump to be seen as a protector when it isn\u2019t clear whom he would be willing to protect.<\/em><\/a><\/h3>\n<\/blockquote>\n

It’s bad enough that Mr Trump invests so much energy in falsely and unnecessarily\u00a0dividing the world into “us” and a presumed hostile and dangerous “them,” but as time goes on it becomes clear that from one day to the next you can’t be sure which of us are on which side of his line. \u00a0This great piece from Benjamin Wallace-Wells at The New Yorker makes this point\u00a0very clearly:<\/p>\n

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TRUMP\u2019S UNRECOGNIZABLE AMERICA<\/a><\/h2>\n

“The\u00a0Muslims have to work with us,\u201d Donald Trump said on Monday, in his speech responding to the slaughter of forty-nine people at Pulse, a gay night club in Orlando, by a twenty-nine-year-old Muslim-American security guard. He repeated, \u201cThey have to work with us. They know what\u2019s going on. They know that he was bad. They knew that the people in San Bernardino were bad. But you know what? They didn\u2019t turn them in. And you know what? We had death, and destruction.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cUs versus them\u201d has been Trump\u2019s theme since the beginning of his candidacy. But the more often he applies it, the more slippery and opportunistic those categories seem. A week ago, in his attack on Judge Gonzalo Curiel<\/a>, Trump suggested that Hispanic-Americans might have divided loyalties. In Orlando, most of the dead were Hispanic-Americans, and so he pledged to protect \u201call Americans within our borders. Wherever they come from, wherever they were born, I don\u2019t care.\u201d\u00a0Hispanics, formerly \u201cthem,\u201d were all of a sudden \u201cus.\u201d Trump moved quickly toward a different \u201cthem,\u201d Muslims, the people who \u201cknow what\u2019s going on.\u201d That same day, he suggested that Barack Obama\u2019s own loyalties might be divided and that the President might have known about the attack in advance. (\u201cHe doesn\u2019t get it, or he gets it better than anybody understands,\u201d Trump said.) Echoing the candidate, Trump\u2019s ally Roger Stone claimed that Huma Abedin, the vice-chair of Hillary Clinton\u2019s campaign, could be a \u201cSaudi spy\u201d or \u201cterrorist agent.\u201d<\/p>\n

In Trump\u2019s speeches, lines of ethnic strife are always present but forever being rearranged\u2014suddenly drawn, then erased, and then drawn again. The pattern shows an intellectual habit of Trump\u2019s\u2014ethnic essentialism, in which individuals are blurred out in favor of the groups to which they belong. Not Muslim-Americans, but \u201cthe Muslims.\u201d Not African-Americans, but \u201cthe blacks.\u201d (2011<\/a>: \u201cI\u2019ve always had a great relationship with the blacks.\u201d) This talk is something of a relic of the New York of the nineteen-eighties, from which Trump himself emerged, suffused with ethnic competition and fear. It was Trump\u2019s sensibility as a real-estate executive of that era, whose managers\u00a0marked \u201cC\u201d for colored<\/a>\u00a0on rental applications. These views incline a business executive and those around him to acts of discrimination and bias. They have an additional effect in a politician trying to make sense of human events: they nudge him toward seeing the entire group as responsible, and blind him to the individual.<\/p>\n

On Monday, the conflict Trump saw was between Muslims and everyone else. \u201cIf we want to protect the quality of life for all Americans\u2014women and children, gay and straight, Jews and Christians and all people\u2014then we need to tell the truth about radical Islam,\u201d he said. But, as is almost always the case, the more we learned about the shooter\u2019s life, the less to the point this sounded. At first, it was possible to see in Omar Mateen a recognizable character: a young, radicalized Muslim man who, on a 911 call just before his attack, pledged allegiance to isis<\/small>. But, in the second news cycle, and then the third, complicating details emerged. Mateen\u2019s father initially said that his son had been angered when he saw two men kissing in Miami, and that this might have inspired the attack, but it turned out that Mateen himself had been a regular at Pulse for years. Two other patrons told reporters that Mateen had recently messaged them via a gay dating app. Mateen\u2019s father has denied that his son was gay, and said, in apologizing for the attack, that \u201cGod himself will punish those involved in homosexuality.\u201d<\/p>\n

Mateen\u2019s bigotry, in the descriptions collated in the news reports, belonged to a familiar American strain, sometimes animated by religion but sometimes not.\u00a0 A man named Daniel Gilroy, who worked with Mateen for about a year, said, \u201cI complained multiple times that he was dangerous, that he didn\u2019t like blacks, women, lesbians, and Jews.\u201d The two men once saw an African-American man drive by them, Gilroy told the Los Angeles\u00a0<\/em>Times<\/a><\/em>, and Mateen said that he wished he could kill all black people, using a racial slur. \u201cYou meet bigots, but he was above and beyond,\u201d Gilroy said. \u201cJust angry, sweating, angry at the world.\u201d Perhaps that anger and sweat had something to do with Islam, or with religiosity generally, but exactly how much is impossible to know. \u201cThe Muslims have to work with us,\u201d Trump said. But that obscures the collective responsibility. Mateen was not \u201can Americanized guy,\u201d as his ex-wife put it to the New York\u00a0<\/em>Times<\/a><\/em>, but an American. His views were visible not just to his co-religionists but also to his co-workers. He was part of our society.<\/p>\n

During the barnstorming, protectionist phase of Trump\u2019s primary campaign, his tendency to talk about \u201cthe Chinese\u201d or \u201cthe Mexicans\u201d as though they were hive-minded actors seemed mostly to betray an allergy to nuance. But, as the general-election campaign has begun, the public scrutiny of Trump\u2019s words has intensified. His ethnic essentialism, the dwelling on dual loyalties, has become not just a point of offense but an electoral problem. For months, some progressives have worried that a terrorist attack could tip the election to Trump, because he might be seen as an avatar of strength. That attack came on Sunday, and, after Trump\u2019s scapegoating reply, those worries have eased. A Bloomberg poll<\/a>\u00a0released Tuesday showed Clinton leading her Republican rival by twelve percentage points; fifty-five per cent of likely voters polled swore that they would \u201cnever\u201d vote for the casino mogul. It\u2019s hard for Trump to be seen as a protector when it isn\u2019t clear whom he would be willing to protect.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

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More articles of interest:<\/p>\n

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