During President Trump’s first term, when journalists reported that behind closed doors he questioned why we were allowing immigration from “s***hole countries” like Haiti or Somalia, Trump dismissed the reports as lies and “fake news.”
Eight years later, at a recent rally in Pennsylvania (that was billed as being about the economy), he boasted about having actually made those remarks and doubled down on his racist and xenophobic views. The shock should not be that he has now implicitly admitted to lying about what he had actually said before.
Rather it is that his continued denigration of whole groups of nonwhite immigrants follows the authoritarian playbook: create a diversion by demonizing “others” as the cause of our national problems; declare that those problems constitute an “emergency;” and use the so called emergency to justify extraordinary police powers that up to now were thought of as clearly unconstitutional.
Americans of all political stripes should be decrying these hateful views and actions by the Trump administration. We have seen this movie too many times before both here and around the world, and it never ends well.
Unfortunately, almost all of our Republican elected officials, in the name of political expediency or simply as a result of being enthralled by their closeness to power, have either been silent or have explicitly supported President Trump and his administration’s disgraceful statements and actions.
And most disappointingly, the Supreme Court, both by its 2024 decision granting the president immunity for “official acts,” and lately via its use of the “shadow docket,” has granted President Trump — and by extension all future presidents — executive powers that it is hard to imagine the framers of the Constitution ever envisioned, and that even former presidents never imagined that they possessed.
We must all speak up whenever possible, and not allow the current administration’s use of fear to fuel our descent from democracy to authoritarianism.
Ira Rubinfeld, Springdale
Donate to the newsroom now. The Salt Lake Tribune, Inc. is a 501(c)(3) public charity and contributions are tax deductible