Sewer rats

This is monstrous even for them.

Vox comments:

This isn’t just an off-the-cuff Trump tweet; it’s from the official White House account and features official-looking video. It’s deliberate political messaging, meant to turn a case that had attracted nationwide attention for weeks into an opportunity to reiterate Trump’s very favorite rhetorical theme: that many immigrants, specifically unauthorized immigrants, are criminals who want to kill you.

The man arrested for Tibbetts’s murder is Cristhian Bahena Rivera, a 24-year-old farmworker. Authorities have told reporters that Rivera is an unauthorized immigrant from Mexico, and that he was able to work on an Iowa farm because he presented a stolen ID.

So Trump’s thugs howled with joy and rushed to capitalize on the news.

Some of Tibbetts’s relatives have urged the public not to focus on Rivera’s immigration status. Tibbetts’s aunt posted on Facebook that “Evil comes in EVERY color”; her cousin attacked conservative activist Candace Owens on Twitter for “generaliz(ing) a whole population based on some bad individuals.”

But the fact that Tibbetts (a photogenic young white woman whose disappearance was already a national story) was allegedly killed by an unauthorized immigrant is exactly what made the White House’s interest in the story inevitable.

Because one potential murdering unauthorized immigrant means all unauthorized immigrants are suspect, is that it? Well ok then: guess who the Nazis were. Germans! Guess who Trump’s grandfather was. A German immigrant! Let’s deport him to Germany right this second.

Most recently, in late June — as the Trump administration’s policy of family separation at the US-Mexico border was dominating the headlines — the White House convened a gathering of such relatives who had been “permanently separated” from their families, implying that the separation of thousands of families (many of them seeking asylum) was justified because it was an effort to save American families from seeing their loved ones killed.

It’s almost a cliché at this point for the White House to answer every criticism of its immigration policy, from its handling of DACA to its separation of families, with the fact that some unauthorized immigrants have killed some Americans. The use of Mollie Tibbetts as another excuse to hammer on this theme, despite the wishes of some family members, may seem callous.

But really it’s calculatingly disgusting beyond anyone’s ability to describe.

5 Responses to “Sewer rats”