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Nayyera Haq: Trump's appeal to racist history
It was no accident that President Trump awarded the Medal of Honor to one of America's most divisive voices, Rush Limbaugh, in the same State of the Union speech where he referenced "America's manifest destiny."
Limbaugh has demonized migrants and immigrants for years by calling them "illegals" who will "undermine" and "attack" America "from within." Trump has capitalized on this right-wing crusade of blaming immigrants for the country's ills to attain and sustain his base.
In his address, Trump laid out the next phase of his vision: an America where communities of color, like immigrants, are kept in check. The last President to use the term manifest destiny in his annual address was Woodrow Wilson in 1920, who also made sure the first film screened at the White House was "The Birth of A Nation," a movie glorifying the early Klan.
In 2020, Trump used his State of the Union to reference those 100-year-old ideas that many scholars view as racist and harmful to the vision of an inclusive America. Trump invoked the rhetoric of an America era when racism was sanctioned by law, indigenous rights were trampled and immigration was limited to people from Europe.
And, in his remarks, Trump ignored the current reality of immigration in favor of fear-mongering, delivering a lengthy diatribe in which he highlighted criminal acts by undocumented immigrants while failing to mention studies that found undocumented immigrants are far less likely to commit crimes than native-born Americans. He also left out the contributions of Dreamers. This all in the wake of Trump's recent blanket ban on visitors from Nigeria, imposed despite the facts immigrants from there are among the most economically successful groups in the country.
It's a view of the American story that denies the current trajectory of the American population, which is set to be majority minority in the next 20 years. The State of the Union proved once again that Trump is a President who will serve to make America great (again)—but only for the select few.
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Posted by Erin Burnett to Rush Limbaugh at February 5, 2020 at 1:39 PM
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