17
Otto Santa Ana, Marco Antonio Juárez, Magaly Reséndez, John Hernández, Oscar Gaytán, Kimberly Cerón, Celeste Gómez, and Roberto Solís
Immigration has always polarized the nation, and it is currently the signature domestic issue of the United States presidency. It is no exaggeration to state that the words and actions of DT, the sitting president, have triggered great personal loss for hundreds of thousands of immigrant, refugee, and American families. (We use “DT” because we prefer not to invoke his name; it already oversaturates the public sphere. The absence of his name allows readers to focus on his rhetorical excesses, rather than on his celebrity status.) DT is a master of mass media manipulation who grabbed and continues to hold the nation’s attention, occupying the White House in part because of a cultural shift that Neil Postman pointed out decades ago: US society no longer lives by the principles set out in the Age of Enlightenment. We now live in the Age of Entertainment where “our presidents … and newscasters need worry less about satisfying the demands of their discipline than the demands of good showmanship” (1986: 98). Martin Kaplan described our plight of a society as one where “entertainment substitutes … storytelling for truth telling, sensation for reason, spectacle for seriousness, combat for discourse, play for purpose, sizzle for steak” (2007: 137).
The current president play-acts much of his role as Chief of State, but his very real actions against immigrants are immoral and destructive. In this chapter, we will describe the discourse he has used to villainize immigrants in order to seize and maintain political power.
Our data emerge from the small part we have played in the lawsuits to stop the president from ending Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA). The US Supreme Court will ultimately decide the legal fate of young immigrants who were carried to the US in the arms of their parents.1 As a team of University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA) undergraduates and their professor, we analyzed DT’s public discourse on immigrants using a replicable empirical method (see Santa Ana et al. 2019a).2 To offer evidence in these cases, we reviewed over 300 of his speeches and 6,000 tweets, some dating to his campaign and others to his presidency. In them, we identified a pernicious and recurrent narrative that he articulates about immigrants. Below we will describe the metaphors that construct this narrative.
We also suggest it is instructive to compare DT’s anti-immigrant discourse to Hitler’s discourse demonizing his Jewish compatriots. In the 1930s, the Nazis fabricated a myth that played to the fears of the majority. They scapegoated Jews, blaming them for all the nation’s problems and calling them “a dangerous bacillus” (germs, in other words) or “rats” whose very nature is “shrewd” and “criminal” (Roseman [2006]2019). The Nazis claimed that Jews were responsible for Germany’s dire circumstances, having supposedly conspired to dominate the world by manipulating international finance. In fact, the Jews were not responsible for the heavy reparation that the World War I victors levied on Germany for its role in the war, nor for the economic collapse following the 1929 stock market crash. Most Aryan Germans had never met a Jew, but the Nazi propaganda machine repeated Hitler’s narrative so effectively that Germans soon loathed, feared, and dehumanized Jews, allowing Nazis to send them first to ghettos, and then to ovens. The rapid spread of this deadly mass delusion hinged on a simplifying discourse that Hitler used to frame Jews as sub-human.
17.1Metaphor Re-imagines Reality: Why the President’s Message is Persuasive
How did the Nazis convince a nation to hate? Historians and social psychologists have offered explanations involving the political and economic dynamics of the time. We offer a complementary account grounded in language. To generate support for their genocidal vision, the Nazis exploited the way human beings make sense of their world by promoting a false worldview through metaphorical frameworks that would guide the public’s reasoning. The study of metaphor as a crucial reality-building device gained traction with the writings of Lakoff and Johnson (1980) and has since been highly developed in cognitive science and language studies (see Kövecses 2010). A “conceptual metaphor” involves understanding one idea – usually an abstract one – in terms of another that is usually more concrete, seemingly simpler and easier to grasp. Abstractions like “love” or “the nation” are complex and hard to understand, until one can use metaphors (e.g. love as journey, for instance, or nation as fortress) to make inferences about them, no matter how oversimplifying.
In the material we discuss below, the president is shown to use metaphors to drastically distort the facts about immigration, a worldwide demographic movement spurred by globalization (Santa Ana 2012: 5). The Nazis and the current US president both concocted entire frameworks of thinking that developed false national narratives involving heroes and villains for their respective nations, and each framework pivots on a few key metaphors. The metaphors DT uses are emotionally triggering, invoking such concepts as “flood” (see Santa Ana et al. 2019a: 13–14) and “invader” (ibid.: 17–18) to frame his political narrative. In the discussion that follows, we pull together evidence for the recurrent metaphorical themes that shape his pernicious views. Then, we look at how he has bolstered his grand narrative with distorting overgeneralizations, using a small part of a population to stand in for and supposedly characterize the whole.
17.2DT’s Guiding Metaphors
On the day he announced his run for the presidency in June of 2015, DT made his intent clear when he denounced Mexican immigrants with patently false claims: “The US has become a dumping ground for everybody else’s problems,” he fulminated. “When Mexico sends its people, they’re not sending their best … They’re sending people that have lots of problems, and they’re bringing those problems with us. They’re bringing drugs. They’re bringing crime. They’re rapists” (Washington Post Staff 2015). Since then, DT has recurrently stated that the nation is imperiled by the presence of such interlopers. Waves of “criminal immigrants” (Santa Ana et al. 2019a: 28), he repeatedly claims, have poured into America unimpeded, threatening to destroy our nation, while “stupid” politicians (mostly Democrats; see Santa Ana et al. 2019a) are to blame for lax immigration enforcement. Our review revealed DT’s fundamental organizing principle regarding the relationship between immigration and the state: us as besieged fortress. In the paragraphs that follow, we draw on his speeches and tweets to extract the metaphorical elements underlying this grand narrative.
17.2.1Nation as Border
A wall is easy to understand, but DT’s repeated urgent call to “save” the nation with a physical wall erected across a 2,000-mile international boundary that follows a river and crosses deserts, mountains, and metropolitan centers is an extraordinarily over-simplified idea. The fantasy he indulges with this metaphor is that (White) America must be perfectly shielded from the non-Whites coming from the South. For him, anything less than a hermetically sealed wall against such immigrants is both useless and a threat to national survival. He has also falsely claimed that his political opponents want the polar opposite, as when he misattributed the following vision to Hillary Clinton during a campaign rally in Portsmouth, New Hampshire, in 2016: “By ‘open borders’ she means totally unlimited immigration” (Factba.se 2015). He went on to imply the lack of his imagined shield spelled doom: “Either we win this election, or we lose the country” (Santa Ana et al. 2019b). Crucially, DT continues to repeatedly define the nation itself in terms of its very boundaries, as in this tweet: “A nation WITHOUT BORDERS is not a nation at all. We must have a wall. The rule of law matters” (Trump on Twitter, July 28, 2015e). The theme recurred in his conversation with Howard Kurtz of Fox News: “In terms of the border, it’s a disgrace. Either we have a border or we don’t have a country. You can’t have a country without borders” (Fox News Insider 2015).
17.2.2Immigration as Flood
In keeping with his narrative that our nation is a fortress imperiled because of its breached walls, DT has justified his plans to build a wall by arguing that immigrants are a dangerous flood pouring into the US: “Our border is wide open, and drugs and criminal cartels are pouring into our country on an hourly basis” (Santa Ana et al. 2019a: 17). He has repeated the metaphor often during his candidacy and presidency: “The Mexican border is a sieve. People are pouring into our country” (Fox News Insider 2015). In fact, before his run, the numbers of unauthorized immigrants coming to the US had fallen.3
17.2.3Mexico as Enemy
DT alludes to Mexico as if it is the enemy of the United States; not only the supposed “second deadliest country in the world” (Santa Ana et al. 2019b), but also a threat to American life and security. To bolster the lie that our nation’s close ally, major trading partner, and peaceful neighbor is conducting military, economic, or any other kind of warfare against the US, he tweeted: “Mexico is killing the United States economically because their leaders and negotiators are FAR smarter than ours. But nobody beats Trump!” (ibid.). He repeatedly declares Mexico to be a threatening enemy, as in this statement about the “southern border” two years later at an Ohio rally: “Never again will America surrender the security of our people, the safety of our communities, or the sovereignty of our nation” (Abramson 2017). Not only is the supposed enemy, Mexico, “sending” (Trump on Twitter, July 13, 2015d, 6:59 am) its worst people, but with its “tremendous crime problem” (Arter 2017) it is also toxic; the drugs “pouring into this country” are “poisoning our youth” (Santa Ana et al. 2019a: 17). Such imagery further bolsters DT’s claim that the wall he proposes is “imperative.”
17.2.4Immigrant as Criminal, Immigrant as Invader
If drugs are supposedly besieging the US from the South, so too are people. DT repeatedly characterizes immigrants from the South as an army of “criminal aliens” and “criminal gangs” that show no remorse toward American citizens; these “bad and dangerous people” coming from Mexico and Central America pour into and threaten the safety of American communities. Consider the following campaign-era tweets: “Druggies, drug dealers, rapists and killers are coming across the southern border. When will the U.S. get smart and stop this travesty?” (Trump on Twitter, June 19, 2015a).4 And: “El Chapo and the Mexican drug cartels use the border unimpeded like it was a vacuum cleaner sucking drugs and death right into the US …” (Trump on Twitter, July 13, 2015b, 06:47 am). DT continued shortly thereafter with, “Likewise billions of dollars gets brought into Mexico through the border. We get the killers, drugs & crime, they get the money!” (Trump on Twitter, July 13, 2015c, 06:53 am). He bolstered this “criminal invaders” metaphor in 2018, when several “caravans” of migrants from Central America trekked north to the Mexico–United States border, mostly fleeing violence and seeking asylum. During the run-up to the November 2018 midterm elections, he got mileage out of his “invader” metaphor, as in this sample tweet that, as of October 27, 2019, received 36,600 retweets and 133,000 likes: “Many Gang Members and some very bad people are mixed into the Caravan heading to our Southern Border … This is an invasion of our Country and our Military is waiting for you!” (Trump on Twitter, October 29, 2018b). The underlying storyline in many presidential speeches and tweets is that the US is under attack, helping to justify the president’s overwrought militaristic response.
17.2.5Immigrant as Animal
According to DT, immigrants are not really human. Addressing law enforcement officials in July 2017, he claimed that immigrant gangs are among the most numerous of immigrants, and their murderous cruelty runs so deep that they “don’t like shooting people because it’s too quick” (Santa Ana et al. 2019b). He enumerated several vivid and gruesome examples in which a US citizen was murdered by these “animals” (ibid.). Without the construction of a border wall, he argued, the carnage of innocent American civilians will continue:
Think of it. They butcher those little girls. They kidnap, they extort, they rape and they rob. They prey on children. They shouldn’t be here. They stomp on their victims. They beat them with clubs. They slash them with machetes, and they stab them with knives. They have transformed peaceful parks and beautiful, quiet neighborhoods into bloodstained killing fields. They’re animals.
(Trump 2017b)
DT urged his audience to vividly imagine his violent fantasized dystopia to stoke their outrage. When journalists later questioned his exaggeration, he only doubled down, repeating his dehumanizing words. His spokespeople stated that his words were directed only at the MS-13 gang, an international criminal organization whose primary targets in the US are Central American migrants. But DT never apologized for or qualified his hyperbole, instead reiterating it. At a rally in Phoenix in August of 2017, for instance, the president stated that sub-human “illegal immigrants” were being purged from the country: “These are animals. We are getting them out of here. We are throwing them in jail, throwing them out of the country” (Schwartz 2017).
17.2.6White America as Victim
The supposed invading force DT described wreaks havoc, rape, and all kinds of violence on Americans, by which he implicitly means White Americans. To make his claims more vivid, he has repeatedly named a number of the fourteen individuals who were actually killed by unauthorized immigrants, as can be seen in his campaign rally speech in Naples, FL, in 2016:5
All across our nation, innocent Americans have been killed by illegal immigrant criminals who should never have been in our country. Kate Steinle was gunned down in her father’s arms in broad daylight on a San Francisco pier. Her killer had been deported five times before. Ninety-year-old Earl Olander was brutally beaten to death in his home by illegal immigrants with criminal records and left on the floor of his home to die. Laura Wilkerson’s teenage son, Josh, was tortured and beaten to do by an illegal immigrant he offered to give a ride home. His body was viciously burned. The examples go on and on and on.
(Santa Ana et al. 2019a: 15)
DT has invoked these unfortunate individuals and their families as stand-ins for the nation: “Countless innocent Americans have been killed by illegal immigrants” (Santa Ana et al. 2019b). The president repeated a version of this “countless Americans” claim eight times in the eleven speeches we analyzed (Santa Ana et al. 2019a). In fact, “countless Americans” have not been killed and the examples do not “go on and on” (Santa Ana et al. 2019a: 15). We will return to this fallacy (below).
17.2.7DT as Hero
In the president’s fictional war of occupation, Mexican leaders have been sending “the worst of the worst” criminals to terrorize White Americans and destroy the country, while politicians before him have been asleep at the wheel. DT himself, in his rhetoric, is positioned as the great liberator. He has vowed to “find, arrest, jail, and deport” every “criminal alien,” and to bring justice to “every mom who has lost her child to illegal immigration” (Santa Ana et al. 2019b). Most absurdly, he has claimed he will “restore” a democracy that we did not know we had lost. Consider these excerpts from his speeches:
To every American who has been waiting for real change, your wait is over – your moment of liberation is at hand. A vote for Trump is a vote to restore Democracy, to heal our economy, and to bring millions of jobs back into every forgotten stretch of this country.
(Hains 2016)
The first task for our new Administration will be to liberate our citizens from the crime and terrorism and lawlessness that threatens their communities. (Lopez 2016)
We will bring back our jobs. We will bring back our borders. We will bring back our wealth. And we will bring back our dreams.
(Trump 2017a)
DT’s claims have been so dramatic that, at a New York law enforcement conference on gangs in 2017, he could not help but remark on his own hyperbole as he referred to himself like some Wild West sheriff, “liberating” towns from immigrants and the MS-13 gang:
One by one, we’re liberating our American towns. Can you believe that I’m saying that? I’m talking about liberating our towns. This is like I’d see in a movie: They’re liberating the town, like in the old Wild West, right? We’re liberating our towns. I never thought I’d be standing up here talking about liberating the towns on Long Island where I grew up, but that’s what you’re doing.
(Haberman and Robbins 2017)
DT has repeated his “liberating” claim often (see, for instance, Hernandez 2018). At a rally in Phoenix on August 21, 2017, he claimed, “We are throwing them out so fast, they never got thrown out of anything like this. We are liberating towns out in Long Island … We are liberating our towns” (Schwartz 2017). DT’s conceptual metaphors add up to a storyline we summarize below, but first, a note on some of the distortions he traffics in.
17.3Distorted Synecdoche: The President’s Shorthand for His Conceptual Metaphors
After so many repetitions of his key metaphors, DT was able to invoke his master narrative in shorthand. Here we mention three expressions in particular that encapsulate his storyline in which he takes a small contingent of people and leverages them as if they somehow characterize the entire phenomenon of immigration. In semiotics, this use of a part of something to stand in for the whole is sometimes called “synecdoche” (see Baumann and Gingrich 2004). In the hands of DT, synecdoche is inevitably distorting, misleading, and politically perilous.
The first synecdoche is “criminal aliens,” as in Trump’s statement during his October 2016 remarks at the Newtown Athletic Club Sports Training Center in Newtown, Pennsylvania: “We will swiftly remove and deport all criminal aliens from this country, and dismantle the gangs and cartels preying on our citizens. Either we win this election, or we lose the country” (Santa Ana et al. 2019b). Recall that it is not a felony to cross the international border; rather, it is a “civil infraction,” a violation of the law that is less serious than a misdemeanor. In contrast, the term criminal typically is associated with serious crimes. By repeatedly using this term, the president attributes the acts of two percent of immigrants who actually commit felonious acts to the ninety-eight percent of unauthorized but otherwise law-abiding immigrants. Listening to him, it is not hard to assume that millions of unauthorized immigrants are a dangerous force.
“MS-13” is his second distorting synecdoche. When the president uses this term, he frequently conflates MS-13 with all Latino gangs, and potentially all undocumented immigrants, as in this statement that he delivered during a New York law enforcement conference on MS-13 in 2017: “We are cracking down hard on the foreign criminal gangs that have brought illegal drugs, violence, horrible bloodshed to peaceful neighborhoods all across our country. We are throwing MS-13 the hell out of here so fast” (Lanktree 2017). Yet the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) estimates that the majority (approximately 80 percent) of MS-13 members are not immigrants at all.6 In many speeches, the president seems to toggle arbitrarily between “illegal immigrants” and “MS-13,” muddying the distinction, as is apparent when he spoke at a rally in Arizona: “The people of Arizona know the deadly and heartbreaking consequences of illegal immigration … The lost lives, the drugs, the gangs, the cartels, the crisis of smuggling and trafficking, and MS-13” (Schwartz 2017). When the president’s audience imagines MS-13 at any mention of immigrants, then he has succeeded at attributing to all undocumented immigrants the incredibly violent behavior of less than one-tenth of one percent (0.08 percent) of them.
Finally, when it comes to White victimhood, DT repeatedly states a handful of roughly a dozen names of Americans actually killed by immigrants as stand-ins for all “beautiful, beautiful, innocent” and largely White Americans (Santa Ana et al. 2019b). He speaks as if each victim had been targeted in a premeditated murder, but his list consists mostly of accidental deaths, such as at the hands of a drunk driver. The fact is that in a nation of 328 million with just over eleven million unauthorized immigrants, immigrants commit fewer crimes of any type than the general US population (Ingraham 2018; see also Bernat 2017). Yet at his first joint session of Congress, the president introduced the relatives of three of the same victims he always mentions, and called on the Department of Homeland Security to create an office focused on the victims of immigrant crime, with instructions to “make public a comprehensive list of criminal actions committed by aliens” (Trump 2017c). Political scientist Peter Beinart compared such actions to those taken by Hitler’s government when it took power in 1933. It too began to broadcast “Jewish crime statistics as a way of stoking anti-Semitism … . Hitler’s Ministry of Justice ordered prosecutors to forward every criminal indictment against a Jew so the ministry’s press office could publicize it” (Beinart 2017). DT’s smears and exaggerations similarly feed a dangerous beast.
17.4DT’s Supporters: Ardent, Yet Complacent
DT’s crude metaphors add up to a storyline that has had mass appeal to his supporters. Our summary of the president’s full, hallucinatory narrative about immigrants follows:
The once great castle on the hill, America, is under siege by a foreign force. The fortress walls are broken; our cities and towns have been flooded by ruthless foreign invaders. Criminal aliens, bloodthirsty animals, are victimizing countless American families. The Mexican government has deployed its violent criminals, drug cartels, MS-13, drug pushers, and human traffickers to occupy and destroy our country. Meanwhile America has been governed by weak and stupid politicians. The presence of illegals is a national existential crisis. As the nation’s heroic defender, I will liberate our country, rid our nation of this invading force, and build a ‘Great Wall’ that will allow us to regain control of the border and hence the nation. Only I can make America great again.
As of mid-2020, over 30 percent of the US electorate still accept the president’s version of daily events and reject mainstream media reporting of his lies. His rock-solid poll numbers are alarming. History provides multiple examples of national leaders who articulated falsehoods to generate fear about a group, and then exploited that fear to justify actions that undercut their nations’ democracies.7 Our current president’s most loyal constituency dismisses any news reports that criticize him, since “journalists are simply trying to bring [him] down” (Rosen 2018). For them, he is the strong leader that the US needs.
It is appropriate to consider how ordinary Germans – not the Nazis – allowed Hitler to bring ruin to their nation. An eyewitness to the horror, author Milton Mayer, interviewed average Germans soon after the war, and found that even after their country had been destroyed, they still applauded Hitler for “clean[ing] up moral degenerates” (Mayer [1955]2017: 102; see also Sunstein 2018). Many Germans rejected the idea that their government murdered six million Jews. Mayer recorded their shifty hedges about the facts: “Some say it happened and some say it didn’t”; “It was wrong, unless they committed treason in wartime. And of course, they did”; or “If it happened, it was wrong. But I don’t believe it happened” – and even if it did, “Hitler had nothing to do with it” ([1955]2017: 65, 184). This level of denial and indifference by seemingly upright citizens in response to war crimes was only possible in a nation where most citizens had “quietly” come to accept the Nazi narrative that vilified the Jew. Hitler did not immediately show himself to be a tyrant. His horrors mounted incrementally, “little by little, all around us” (ibid.: 168), as one German citizen put it later, thus allowing him to become one. The regime distracted its citizens through endless dramas, often involving real or imagined enemies, which gradually led to people habituating to being “governed by surprise … Each step was so small, so inconsequential, so well explained” that people could no more see it “developing from day to day than a farmer in his field sees the corn growing. One day it is over his head” (Mayer [1955]2017: 166–68; see also Sunstein 2018).
The celebrated historian of the Holocaust, Timothy Snyder, recently wrote, “Americans are no wiser than the Europeans who saw democracy yield to fascism, Nazism and communism. Our one advantage is that we might learn from their experience” (2017: 13). Alas, for many the lesson has not sunk in. Millions of Americans have become desensitized to images of imprisoned children who were separated from their parents by DT’s administration’s policies, and are unmoved by the images of an asylum-seeking Honduran mother and her diapered daughters running from tear gas fired by US Border Patrol agents (see Kyung-Hoon 2018). Church-going American citizens condone policies that turn truly desperate families and genuine refugees away from our borders. Meanwhile DT continues to use the language of the Nazis with his scare mongering: “illegal immigrants, no matter how bad they may be … pour into and infest our country, like MS-13” (Trump on Twitter, June 19, 2018a). When ordinary American citizens come to believe that the most wretched people at our borders are vermin intent on destroying our powerful nation, they will permit DT to treat humans inhumanely.
Notes
1.In 2017 the president attempted to rescind DACA by executive action. DACA allows people who came to the US without documentation before they were 16 to be protected from immediate deportation, if they lived continuously in the US, were under 31 years of age in 2007, and have a high school diploma or GED or an honorable military discharge and no criminal record. DACA grantees obtain limited “consideration of deferred action” for two years, with possible renewal. DACA does not grant “lawful” status, only less likelihood of being deported. Sixteen states took the president to court, claiming he acted to rescind DACA with “racial animus” and “discriminatory intent,” a violation of the Equal Protection Clause of the US Constitution.
2.In September 2017 Professor Robert Chang of the Korematsu Center for Law and Equality asked us to produce a report on DT’s public discourse toward Latinos and immigrants. The first author had previously served as a plaintiffs’ expert in a civil rights case where the public discourse of the Arizona senator who authored SB-1070 expressed “discriminatory intent” and “racial animus” toward Mexican immigrants (Santa Ana 2019). Our report findings, “Final report of the University of California, Los Angeles, DACA Defense Group,” were cited in an Amicus Brief submitted to the New York district court. Subsequently our findings became a “declaration” submitted to the 2nd and 9th circuit US Appellate Courts as part of an Amicus Brief, and ultimately, to US Supreme Court. The full pre-publication report presents our empirical and methodological approach in depth, as well as our findings (Santa Ana et al. 2019a). It can be accessed and downloaded via www.thepresidentsintent.com/issue-final-report. The Supreme Court Amici Curiae Brief (i.e. Department of Homeland Security et al., Petitioners, v. Regents of The University of California et al., Respondents; specifically, see pages 21–4) can be accessed via https://bit.ly/2N2sARj.
3.The nation’s unauthorized immigrant population reached a peak of 12.2 million in 2007. Since then, the population has declined to 11.1 million. The number of unauthorized immigrants from Mexico has fallen from a peak of 6.9 million in 2007 to 5.8 million in 2014 (Radford and Noe-Bustamante 2019).
4.We did not edit the grammatical, spelling, or punctuation infelicities of the president’s tweets.
5.The frequently named victims are Earl Olander, Casey Chadwick, Marilyn Pharis, Kate Steinle, Grant Ronneback, the son of Jamiel Shaw, Brandon Mendoza, the daughter of Sabine Durden, Sarah Root, Starlette Pitts, the son of Laura Wilkerson, Kris Eggle, and Nick Erfle.
6.In 2018 the US government estimated that MS-13 had 10,000 members (Correa-Cabrera et al. 2018). In 2009, the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) estimated that MS-13 included 30–50,000 members and associate members worldwide, of whom 20 percent (8–10,000) resided in the US (National Gang Intelligence Center 2009: 25).
7.We can point to the demise of contemporary Polish democracy under President Andrzej Duda. He instituted a number of anti-immigrant measures, but with a firewall of support from the anti-immigrant and nationalist core of the electorate, he has instituted other undemocratic moves to limit court and media independence, and even to outlaw unfavorable accounts of the role of Poles during the Holocaust (see Michnik 2011, for example).
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Schwartz, Ian. 2017. “Trump: We Are ‘Liberating’ Our Towns of Illegal Immigrants, Gangs.” Real Clear Politics, August 22, 2017. https://bit.ly/2Jn6uGU.
Snyder, Timothy. 2017. On Tyranny: Twenty Lessons from the Twentieth Century. Tim Duggan Books.
Sunstein, Cass. 2018. “It Can Happen Here.” Review of They Thought They Were Free: The Germans, 1933–45 by Milton Mayer and Broken Lives: How Ordinary Germans Experienced the Twentieth Century by Konrad H. Jarausch. New York Review of Books, June 28, 2018. https://bit.ly/31IiGbu.
Trump, Donald. 2017a. “The Inaugural Address.” WhiteHouse.gov, January 20, 2017. https://bit.ly/31KVole.
Trump, Donald.2017b. “Remarks by President Trump to Law Enforcement Officials on MS 13.” WhiteHouse.gov, July 28, 2017. https://bit.ly/2JrCB89.
Trump, Donald.2017c. “Executive Order: Enhancing Public Safety in the Interior of the United States.” WhiteHouse.gov, January 25, 2017. https://bit.ly/2Jscr5d.
Trump, Donald (@realDonaldTrump). 2015a. “Druggies, drug dealers, rapists and killers are coming across the southern border. When will the U.S. get smart and stop this travesty?” Twitter, June 19, 2015. https://bit.ly/2BL9CIh.
Trump, Donald2015b. “El Chapo and the Mexican drug cartels use the border unimpeded like it was a vacuum cleaner, sucking drugs and death right into the U.S.” Twitter, July 13, 2015, 06:47 am. https://bit.ly/2qGEAPp.
Trump, Donald2015c. “…. likewise, billions of dollars gets brought into Mexico through the border. We get the killers, drugs & crime, they get the money!” Twitter, July 13, 2015, 06:53 am. https://bit.ly/363qLuN.
Trump, Donald2015d. “When will people, and the media, start to apologize to me for my statement, ‘Mexico is sending …’, which turned out to be true? El Chapo.” Twitter, July 13, 2015, 06:59 am. https://bit.ly/2WpuC0R.
Trump, Donald2015e. “A nation WITHOUT BORDERS is not a nation at all. We must have a wall. The rule of law matters. Jeb just doesn’t get it.” Twitter, July 28, 2015. https://bit.ly/2JsaUft.
Trump, Donald2018a. “Democrats are the problem. They don’t care about crime and want illegal immigrants, no matter how bad they may be, to pour into and infest our Country, like MS-13. They can’t win on their terrible policies, so they view them as potential voters!” Twitter, June 19, 2018. https://bit.ly/2BL9LeH.
Trump, Donald2018b. “Many Gang Members and some very bad people are mixed into the Caravan heading to our Southern Border. Please go back, you will not be admitted into the United States unless you go through the legal process. This is an invasion of our Country and our Military is waiting for you!” Twitter, October 29, 2018. https://bit.ly/32Qon8 J.
Washington Post Staff. 2015. “Full Text: Donald Trump Announces a Presidential Bid.” The Washington Post, June 16, 2015. https://wapo.st/2WfeBKR.