Before the election, Donald Trump asked black voters
“What do you have to lose?” by voting for him. I supposed it is a fair question
to ask, although by setting a certain “tone,” particularly by putting some people
with different degrees of racial insensitivity—and in some cases, outright
racists—in key positions, like Rudy Giuliani, Steve Bannon, Jeff Sessions and
a future Supreme Court justice, I think they have more to lose than they think.
White people, on the other hand, have very little to lose. Let’s be honest: The
Republican Party in whatever guise to reveals itself in is the “White People’s
Party,” and whatever “differences” white people have only effect each other on
a political level, not the social level. Whites are not the one’s “discomfited” by
right-wing social policies.
Nevertheless, I wouldn’t be the least bit
surprised that there is a Democratic demographic or two in this country that
are “happy” that Trump was elected after all, if it means that he’ll get rid of
all the “Mexicans,” and they can work to whatever “standard” they feel is their
“right” to without having to worry about the “competition.” Trump told 60 Minutes that “What we are going to do
is get the people that are criminal and have criminal records, gang members,
drug dealers, we have a lot of these people, probably 2 million, it could
be even 3 million, we are getting them out of our country or we’re going to
incarcerate. But we’re getting them out of our country, they’re here
illegally.” That will allegedly “open-up” a lot of jobs for “real Americans”—or
more likely not.
Trump’s figures reflect his belief that at least one-third of “Mexicans”
who come here are criminals who just want to commit crimes, instead of for the
same reason that other immigrants come here for, a better life for themselves
and their families. As the Washington Post reported, Trump’s numbers
are far from factual. “‘The facts just don’t support that claim. We
know that there are close to 2 million — 1.9 million, precisely — and they are
the whole universe of foreign born people’ who are convicted of crimes, said
Muzaffar Chishti, director of Migration Policy Institute’s office at the New
York University School of Law.” What he means is that not all of them are “Mexicans”;
some of them are Asian, European (Russian organized crime is big in this country) and African.
“The exact number of illegally present
noncitizens within that 1.9 million figure is unclear. Calculations by the
Migration Policy Institute, a think tank that doesn’t take positions on
immigration legislation, show about 820,000 (43 percent) of the 1.9 million are unauthorized immigrants
with criminal convictions,” according to the Post; again, not all of them are “Mexicans.” As might be expected,
Trump’s “facts” are the product of anti-nonwhite immigration groups and a
person or two on hate-watch lists.
The Post also reported that Trump’s immigration round-up proposal
would allow anyone who fits a “ racial profile” to be targeted by local police
and arrested for any real or invented crime—and be subject to immediate
deportation without due process rights.
Trump’s sure
hates the “Mexicans,” and his reasons may actually be at variance with the
average paranoid bigot looking for scapegoats to explain the pathetic
trajectory of their lives. Last September, The
Daily Beast reported that Trump’s hatred of “Mexicans” has more to do with “business”
deals gone bad, and a thirst for vengeance. Trump’s tweets on the subject:
The Mexican legal
system is corrupt, as is much of Mexico. Pay me the money that is owed me now -
and stop sending criminals over our border
I have a lawsuit
in Mexico’s corrupt court system that I won but so far can’t collect. Don’t do
business with Mexico!
Mexico’s court system corrupt I want
nothing to do with Mexico other than to build an impenetrable WALL and stop
them from ripping off U.S.
\
This
sounds like someone with a particularly bad beef about something that is
causing him not to think straight and hate crooked. The Beast reported that
Years ago, Trump had signed a business
agreement with businessman Pedro Rodriguez worth millions, in order to bring
the Miss Universe pageant to Mexico City in 2007. While Rodriguez paid him a
fraction of the cost up front, Rodolfo Rosas Moya’s properties were apparently
put up in a trust as collateral for the rest.
But Trump claims that he didn’t get
paid according to the agreement, and subsequent court action has failed to
yield the millions of dollars he believes he’s owed.
Mexican newspapers report that Trump’s
beef with Rosas Moya focuses on 25 empty lots in a plush part of Playa del
Carmen. Trump even reportedly
won an arbitration against Rosas Moya in Mexico in 2012—but didn’t make any
progress on recouping the lost cash.
Trump believes that he is owed some $12
million from the agreement, according to a 2015 Bloomberg report.
The Trump campaign did not respond to a request for comment.
His Mexican legal troubles seemed to
anger him deeply—and in a tweetstorm last year he explicitly expanded his
personal irritation with the Mexican legal system to implicate Mexicans more
broadly.
Rosas
Moya has retorted that “I think Donald Trump has no moral standing to make
statements against me or against my country, much less to make fun of Mexican
law and Mexico in the way that he is doing,” and in any case I’m sure that
those who think that the Miss Universe pageant is a “sexist” meat market couldn’t
care less if Trump lost “millions” on it. Trump has also had one or two
development projects that went “south” in Mexico, one a luxury condominium that
was mostly sold-out until it was discovered that Trump had only lent his name
to the project for a licensing fee, and had never intended to see it through to
completion. “More than a hundred hopeful
homeowners who had put their faith in the Trump name sued him and the partner
company, Irongate Capital Partners, eventually settling with the developer for
$7.2 million. In 2013, the homeowners and Trump reached a separate and
confidential agreement for an undisclosed amount.”
Trump
was also thwarted—supposedly because a “bribe” was demanded from him—in an
attempt to develop a protected “bio-reserve” with 7.5 miles of virgin beach.
The mayor of Cozumel had led him to believe that there was “no problem” in his
proposal for developing on a federally-protected site, but the “price” was too
high for him.
The Beast noted that Trump’s foreign policy ideas have more to do with
“personal contacts” than with understanding of the nuances of diplomacy;
Russian observers have noted that his “friendship” with Russian dictator
Vladimir Putin is an example of his naiveté of the duplicitous nature of many Russian
politicians, particularly those allied with Putin. What makes Trump really
“mad” is losing money, and that seems to be the basis of his “vendetta” against
Mexicans. This is not “diplomacy,” but idiocy.
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