Part IV
15
Janet McIntosh
In spite of his reality-defying claim that he is “the least racist person that you’ve ever encountered” (Lopez 2019), Trump’s tendency to exclude, caricature, and scapegoat non-Whites has been widely documented. A 2019 Atlantic article (Graham et al. 2019) summarizes just a few chapters of his racist past and present, including his anger toward people of color in competition with him (as when he opposed casinos run by Native Americans in the early 1990s–2000s), his anxiety surrounding upwardly mobile African Americans (e.g. on The Apprentice), his equivocations about neo-Nazis (see Hodgson, this volume), his administration’s flagrant neglect of Puerto Rico compared with Houston when both were slammed by hurricanes, and his generally “very Aryan” view of race. Trump repeatedly lifts from the Fox News playbook of racial ideology, presuming that people of color hold themselves back with their own dysfunctions; that Whites are the victims of reverse racism; and that minorities who criticize government policy are “ungrateful” or “unpatriotic” (Waldman 2019). He has pandered time and again to White supremacists, repeatedly denigrated people of color, and reliably attracted voters who score high on measures of racism (Lopez 2019). Though he may deny it, his statements and actions cumulatively point toward the notion that “making America great again” means bringing it back to an era of more overt White supremacy. And whiteness, for Trump, is mapped onto the English language and particular ways of speaking it, while White superiority is encoded in his word choices, his metaphors, and his mockery.
Several chapters in this section address the way language can be weaponized in service of Trump’s authoritarian White nationalism. This section introduction furnishes some broader context from linguistic anthropology to address how racism and xenophobia often play out in Trump’s linguistic tool kit.
15.1The Politics of Language Varieties
In human semiotic systems, language varieties – a linguist’s phrase for what people usually call “languages” and “dialects” – often stand for something much more than themselves. This is a classic finding in the study of language ideology: opinions about language varieties often mirror peoples’ attitudes toward the speakers of those languages. And once the very name of a language can be used to invoke prejudice, all kinds of semiotic creativity follows.
Consider Trump’s tweet from October 2012: “Why does Barack Obama’s ring have an arabic inscription? Who is this guy?” (Trump on Twitter, October 11, 2012). The tweet links to an article from a conspiratorial right-wing website that spuriously claims Obama’s ring is inscribed with the Islamic declaration of faith: “There is no god except Allah” (Mikkelson 2014). But Trump’s supporters wouldn’t even have to click on the link to know what his tweet was driving at. The way Trump concatenates those two sentences (“Why does …?” and “Who is …?”) sets up the Arabic language on its own to cast doubt on Obama’s trustworthiness and identity. The very name of the language also furnishes a quick semiotic trigger for alarmist bigotry about Muslims. Trump’s supporters will instantly cast their minds to the birther narrative that Obama is actually “foreign” born and to the long-standing conspiratorial rumor that he’s a closet Muslim who hoped to bring sharia law to the United States. Scholars and the media have taken to calling this kind of condensed symbolism “dog-whistling”; it refers to using coded terminology that a target audience will understand, in service of racist fear mongering (Haney López 2015). Trump’s paranoid demonization of Muslims reached its peak with his efforts to establish a “complete shutdown of Muslims entering the United States,” a stance very likely to stoke the energy of terrorist groups that feed off hostility (Hodges 2019: 86, 90).
But in spite of Trump’s Islamophobia, Arabic hasn’t been his primary linguistic target. A more prominent bugbear for him has been Spanish, which Trump links to the supposed “animals” and “rapists” migrating from Mexico and elsewhere in Latin America. Latinxs make up approximately 10 percent of the national vote, and although most speak English, Spanish is a powerful symbol of identity and an important medium of communication for millions in the US. But Trump refused to campaign in the language, being the only major-party candidate who never translated his website into Spanish or bought ad time on Spanish-language television or radio (Goldmacher 2016). This eloquent silence was politically calculated: while he might lose some Latinx votes, he counted on his anti-Hispanic stance to garner support from voters who align with Trump’s claims – which Santa Ana et al. document in their chapter below – that Spanish-speaking immigrants are “flooding in,” “taking over,” “bringing crime,” and somehow polluting the nation while sucking it dry with their reliance on welfare “handouts.” Trump seems oblivious to the fact that crime rates among immigrants are lower than among native-born Americans (Ingraham 2018), or that immigrants have been vital to the American economy. How telling that the Trump campaign’s momentary dabbling in Spanish consisted of a single, misused word. At the Republican convention in Cleveland, officials handed out signs that read “Hispanics Para Trump,” which didn’t even translate the word “Hispanics” and used the incorrect Spanish word for “for” (para instead of por; Goldmacher 2016). They could hardly be bothered to try.
Trump’s neglect of Spanish connects to a nationwide conservative “English-only” (sometimes referred to as “Official English”) movement. The US doesn’t have a legal policy mandating an official national language, so various organizations have pushed for bills or constitutional amendments that would require English to be used at all levels of government, repealing federal mandates for the translation of government documents and voting ballots into other languages (Crawford 2000). Such organizations usually oppose bilingual education, too, and would withhold citizenship from those who don’t pass a certain English language standard – an initiative the Trump administration supported in its proposed immigration legislation in May 2019 (Smith 2019).
But the legal details of such efforts sometimes matter less than the affective hostility that these movements concentrate against Spanish as a language and, by extension, its speakers. At the beginning of his presidential campaign, for instance, Trump admonished his adversary Jeb Bush for his outreach to the Latinx community and his use of Spanish, the language of his Mexican-American wife Columba: “This is a country where we speak English, not Spanish” (Berenson 2015). A tweet produced in 2015 made a similar criticism: “Jeb Bush is crazy, who cares that he speaks Mexican, this is America, English!!” (Gass 2015). Notice how in this tweet, Trump directly maps Spanish onto Mexico, as if it belongs in that territory and should stay there – like the people themselves, presumably. In keeping with this simplistic model of what makes an “American” (a model further documented in Alim and Smitherman’s chapter), the Trump administration took down the Spanish-language version of the White House website on January 20, 2017. His Hispanic media outreach team has reportedly been inadequately staffed and compromised by abrupt exits (Bonazzo 2018).
Contrary to Trump and the English-only movement, many multilingual nations have managed to hold together successfully. In Singapore, India, Malaysia, South Africa, Aruba, Luxembourg, and many more, large segments of the population are fluent in three or more languages. But it’s been a powerful belief among ethnonationalists in Europe and the United States that nations cohere best when they have only one language (Blommaert and Verschueren 1992). And since Trump speaks only English (in spite of having had two wives with different first languages: Czech and Slovenian) and likes to project himself as an ideal, it makes sense that his monoglot limitations furnish the limits of his model of the nation. How ironic that in Trump’s America, millions of English-speakers now feel more profoundly cleaved apart from one other than ever.
15.2Mock Spanish and Covert Racism
Trump occasionally ventures into Spanish, but not through any embrace of bilingualism. Most notoriously, during the final presidential debate with Hillary Clinton in October 2016, he spoke about his plans to expunge “all of the drug lords” from the country with the following (mispronounced) Spanish word: “We have some bad hombres here and we’re gonna get ’em out” (Zezima 2016). Linguistic anthropologist Adam Schwartz (2016) immediately analyzed Trump’s usage within Jane Hill’s (2008) framework of Mock Spanish. According to Hill, Anglo-Americans often use mispronounced or inaccurate versions of Spanish in an effort to be amusing or “cool,” but these uses have a hidden meaning. As Schwartz summarizes it, Mock Spanish is “an often unconsciously strategic effort to silently dominate the folks who are imagined to speak that language” (2016). He goes on: “Trump did not say ‘bad men.’ He said ‘bad HOMBRES.’ It was HOMBRES that connected the notion of ‘immigrant’ not simply to ‘men’ (the literal translation of that word), but to what the Spanish-ness of his choice could index: MEXICAN men as inherently undesirable, ‘illegal,’ criminal, violent.” As Mendoza-Denton notes in her chapter in this section, Trump’s use of Mock Spanish says volumes about his wish to exude (White) American domination, a stance not lost on Latin American strongmen themselves.
Indeed, Trump has repeatedly dipped into select Spanish words or phrases, using them in supposedly jocular ways that in fact have negative connotations. In a speech in Miami in 1999, for instance, Trump said of Fidel Castro: “If I could meet Castro right now, I’d have personally two words for him: ‘Adiós, amigo!’” (Trump n.d.). Such “tough talk” in Spanish is nearly identical to the Mock Spanish Hill analyzes from the Terminator 2: Judgment Day film, where Arnold Schwarzenegger and others use the phrase “Hasta la vista, baby” to adopt a menacing persona. Such “pejoration” of Spanish words and phrases, to use Hill’s word, is one tip-off that Trump is asserting symbolic dominance, rather than engaging in appreciative borrowing or bona fide code switching. Another tip-off is his casual errors. Trump has repeatedly used the word “loco” (crazy), for instance, to denigrate Democrats, the Fed, and the media. (After calling the media “loco” while answering questions on the White House lawn he quipped “I used that word because of the fact that we made a deal with Mexico,” as if somehow that made his use of Spanish relevant [Smith 2018].) Using loco correctly would require gender and number agreement with preceding nouns: Democrats (los Demócratas) would be locos, the media (las redes medias) would be locas, and so forth. Yet every time Trump uses the term, he ends it with the masculine affix, –o. After Hurricane Maria devastated Puerto Rico in 2017, an overtly hostile Trump used a deliberately showy mispronunciation of the country’s name that sounded something like “pwehto hikow” (On Demand News 2017). Like many of Trump’s parodic performances (see Goldstein et al., this volume), this performance seemed at least in part a dig at PC attitudes; he was pretending, in derisive fashion, to pronounce the place name correctly, as if to mock those who care enough to try. More to the point, Trump repeatedly links Spanish to people and conditions he considers undesirable, while his errors reflect a further disregard for – and sometimes deliberate mockery of – the language and, by extension, its speakers.
Trump gets away with this because, as Hill notes, such mock mimicry often passes unnoticed by the broader population. When Anglo-Americans hear Mock Spanish, many simply take it at face value, thinking it funny or cool and nothing more. Others may have a feeling there’s something off, but have difficulty putting their finger on what or why. For this reason, Mock Spanish constitutes a form of covert racism that can be hard to throw into relief except with the most egregious juxtapositions. As Hill (2008: 45) notes, “One cannot say, ‘I’m not racist, but adios, sucker!’”
15.3Word Choice and Dehumanization
If some racist language in the Trump era is stealthy, much is overt. Such unguarded verbal practice resonates with Trump’s anti-PC stance (see Introduction, this volume). After all, many Trump supporters have reported their resentment of liberal pressure to uplift – or at the very least refrain from denigrating – historically marginalized groups. With the backing of his base, Trump feels emboldened to describe certain non-White social groups as if they are less than human. Mexicans are “rapists” (who, in Trump’s vicious imagination, should be shot in the legs or set upon by alligators if they try to cross the border [Shear and Davis 2019]); Muslims are “terrorists” (Boum, below); African immigrants come from “shitholes” (Williams, below). Rumors have swirled that Trump was caught on tape using the n-word during the filming of his pre-presidential reality show, The Apprentice (Hutzler 2019). And a short, official article on the WhiteHouse.gov website refers to members of the gang MS-13 as “animals” no fewer than ten times (Trump 2018). While there’s no doubt the gang’s violence has been heinous, this verbal effort to dehumanize them is so pedantic it would be comical if the implications weren’t so serious.
Trump and supporters have also developed a stock vocabulary of dehumanizing terms to discuss migration. The following June 2019 headline from the conspiratorial website Infowars.com uses several: “Hundreds of illegals from Ebola-ridden Congo dumped in Texas, 350 more on the way … Major threat ignored by mainstream media” (McBreen 2019). Undocumented immigrants are “illegals.” They are “dumped” like trash, not dropped off. The central African nation of Congo is “Ebola-ridden,” as if crawling with pestilence – perhaps all 350 of those dropped off are infected? (Far more likely, from a medical and epidemiological standpoint, is that none are.) Meanwhile, the “mainstream media” is in denial of this supposed “threat” to public safety. But Trump’s public has learned to adopt his language. Trump’s countless references to Latinx migrants as “invaders” has caught on, as seen in November 2019 when a White Milwaukee man allegedly threw battery acid on a Peruvian immigrant walking from his car into a Mexican restaurant, yelling: “Why did you come here and invade my country?” (Moreno 2019). While the suspect is apparently a veteran suffering from PTSD, he, like many Americans in distress, appears to have channeled his malaise into a hostile idiom provided by the president.
Trump and supporters seem to have historical amnesia as to when we have encountered such dehumanizing language before. The Nazis of the Third Reich fomented genocidal impulses by erasing the humanity of Jews and other groups, talking about them as polluted sub-humans. The Hutu political elite in Rwanda in 1994 successfully encouraged mass slaughter of Tutsis with a state campaign that used radio channels to enjoin people to “exterminate the cockroaches” (Ndahiro 2019). Dehumanizing language is also used by right-wing populists across Europe today. Alarmingly, we know from history that it can be a slippery slope from endorsing dehumanizing language to endorsing outright violence. Some linguistic anthropologists have recently amplified their activist efforts to draw attention to the link between language and social justice (Avineri et al. 2019). Jonathan Rosa (2019), for instance, has been among linguistic anthropologists supporting the “Drop the I-Word Campaign,” which raises awareness about the stigmatizing political word “illegal” in discussions of (im)migration. What may also be needed is sustained public consciousness-raising about what anthropologists, historians, psychologists, and language theorists alike have noted: As irritating as the PC movement may be to Trump’s supporters, cruel word choice can cost lives.
15.4A Strongman and His Others, and International Responses
The chapters in this section examine Trump’s verbal stances toward some of the social groups and polities he frames as “other.” There’s the “other” within the US, implicated in some of Trump’s offhand remarks and carefully teased out in Alim and Smitherman’s analysis. Trump uses a common rhetorical strategy, they argue, to draw attention to the supposedly “exceptional” English of one individual of color, in so doing racializing an entire group and setting up an implicit White supremacist model of citizenship and belonging within the United States. Then there’s Trump’s xenophobia, in which he portrays “others” outside the nation – be they Latinx peoples, or “radical Islamic terrorists” – as if they are vermin trying to infiltrate American borders to sponge resources and take American lives. Trump achieves this portrait through a series of interlocked metaphors that portray the US as a fortress in peril (Santa Ana et al., this section), while his narrative stances conflate supposed infiltrators from the South with so-called terrorists from the Middle East, refusing any diplomatic engagement with or curiosity about Middle Eastern societies (Boum, this section). In referring to migrants from African nations, Trump uses the language of stigma and pollution (“shithole”; see Williams, this section). Meanwhile, his priorities emerge in his language: he prefers people to come from supposedly clean, White-dominant areas of the world (Scandinavia!); he’s willing to overlook Islamic identification if the people he knows from a given nation (e.g. Saudi Arabia) are both rich and his personal “friends”; and he favors nationalist leaders who exude tough masculinity like himself (see Mendoza-Denton, this section).
In these chapters, we also locate some of the voices striving to check, neutralize, and respond to Trump’s bigotry and tough talk. How Trump’s aggressive ethnonationalism lands depends on the audience; that is, it depends on any given country’s experience with colonialism and whiteness, and their own historical anxieties about leadership and status. We can infer from Alim and Smitherman’s Obama-era interviews with Americans on the linguistic margins that Trump’s compliment to a Latinx border agent (“He speaks perfect English!”) will likely have been read by its targets as the backhanded remark that it is. We see in Williams’ analysis that Trump’s language of pollution is profoundly offensive in Southern Africa in part because it is so redolent of the dehumanizing language of apartheid. Williams demonstrates how Southern Africans have responded to Trump through parody, or by adopting a dignified register that claims the high ground while projecting pollution back onto Trump. In the Middle East, Boum shows us, Trump’s parsing of the region according to how he can monetize it has led to both cynicism and anxiety. Mendoza-Denton demonstrates how recently-elected Mexican President Andrés Manuel López Obrador tries to deflect Trump’s put-downs by tracking an ideal of Mexican rural masculinity, striving to revalorize indigeneity and the common man. By contrast, Brazil’s hard-right Bolsonaro seems to have gotten a hit of inspiration as he inhales the vapors from Trump’s ethnonationalism. Aligning himself neatly with Trump, Bolsonaro has adopted similar verbal ways of enacting strongman masculinity while targeting vulnerable groups – in his case minorities, women, and LGBTQ+ individuals. This broad international perspective shows us Trump’s style is far from unique, and as troubling as it has been to many, it seems to have kindled the fire under other global autocrats.
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