Trump Calls Undocumented Immigrants “Animals” Who Torture Teen Girls in Fear-Mongering Speech

If you were horrified by Donald Trump’s unhinged, inappropriate, and hateful speech to the Boy Scouts, here’s something even worse.

Trump held a rally at Youngstown, Ohio on Tuesday and delivered a 2020 campaign speech where he claimed, “With the exception of the late, great Abraham Lincoln, I can be more presidential than any president that’s ever held this office.” Jumping from praises for “liberating our citizens from this Obamacare nightmare” to praises for the Second Amendment, the speech could’ve just been another stream-of-consciousness terror, but a fear-mongering rant on undocumented immigrants took the speech to another level of dangerous, violent, and racist. Which is saying something, considering how low the standard has fallen and how far we have fallen from any form of decency.

Here’s the excerpt about immigrants which is making headlines:

“And you’ve seen the stories about some of these animals. They don’t want to use guns, because it’s too fast and it’s not painful enough. So they’ll take a young, beautiful girl—16, 15 and others—and they slice them and dice them with a knife because they want them to go through excruciating pain before they die. And these are the animals that we’ve been protecting for so long. Well, they’re not being protected anymore, folks.”

Here, Trump is likely referring to the vicious murder of Nisa Mickens and Kayla Cuevas who were victims of the MS-13 gang. While an absolute tragedy, using their deaths to justify his xenophobic and racist hate is nothing short of abhorrent. Using the crimes of a select few to justify discrimination and call an entire group of people animals and gang members is nothing short of racist.

Trump’s rhetoric here is textbook xenophobic fear-mongering. Dehumanizing undocumented immigrants as “animals” has it’s roots in painting people of color as more savage, less evolved, and aggressively prone to violence. It evokes a traditional of scientific racism and state violence that defended itself by establishing the white population as civilizers and protectors.

The language of protecting women from black and brown bodies is also nothing new. In fact, spreading the idea that the vulnerable female body must be protected from the intruder is straight out of the white supremacist propaganda book. There’s a huge misogynistic undercurrent to this rhetoric as well, as it’s often based on the notion that the nation’s “women” belong to the men and any harm to them is a violation of male honor. Considering the way we’ve seen his team attack reproductive rights and protections for survivors of assault, it seems evident that he’s more interested in using these women are tools for his agenda rather that really protecting American women.

Do you remember when he insinuated that a woman who accused him of harassment wasn’t attractive enough for him to assault? Or any of his other infamous brags about assaulting women? I think about it quite often, because it shows that Trump and anyone that buys into his fear-mongering don’t actually care about protecting and supporting women. It shows that they’re doing harm under the guise of helping a “young, beautiful girl,” and will turn on those young girls at the drop of the hat by denying them care, rights, and legal protection.

Don’t get it twisted, Trump’s comments are fear-mongering 101 and he doesn’t care about protecting women. We need to protect teenage girls from Trump more than we need to protect them from immigrants.

(via The Slot, image: screencap)

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