It is certainly awful, disgusting, appalling and the usual adjectives that apply to Donald Trump that he referred to “shithole countries.” In doing so, he proved once again that he has neither class nor the good sense to understand that words, particularly those of the president of the United States, have import. He needlessly insulted millions of people around the world and once again besmirched the good name of our country.
But that was not his great sin. For certainly there are countries that remain poverty-stricken, disease-ridden, benighted places where most of us lucky enough to live in this and other rich, advanced societies would be loath to live. (Though these poor nations may also have their charms.)
Whether these countries qualify as “shitholes” or merely less-developed is not the point.
The point is that Donald Trump, reflecting a sort of early 20th century Social Darwinism, believes that those countries are a mess because the people who live in them are incapable of doing better. They are, genetically, inferior to those living in places like...well, like Norway. (Full disclosure: my grandfather immigrated from Norway in 1902. To escape dire poverty.)
This is the real perniciousness in Tump’s remarks, not that he insulted other nations (bad as that is). He imputed that some people — not coincidentally, somewhat darker people — are not capable of being part of an advanced society.
At the risk of falling to Godwin’s Law and losing my argument, this is precisely the kind of racial arguments the Nazis made about the Jews. The Jews were evil vermin to be exterminated. It was part of their biological, racial make-up, a fundamental characteristic of the race. Thus it made no difference if you were a Jew who had converted to Christianity; the spoor of evil was in the race, not the religion.
We needn’t belabor how ignorant, heinous and just plain wrong are Trump’s sentiments. We needn’t point to all the Nigerian doctors and Haitian teachers and Salvadoran entrepreneurs among us to refute Trump’s argument that immigrants from these countries will bring with them some sort of bacillus of decrepit Third Worldism with them. It is laughable on its face.
Unfortunately, the fact that we are stuck with this evil, racist fool is not quite so laughable.
