Wednesday, May 16, 2018

What We Talk About When We Talk About Sanctuary Cities

President Donald Trump is a wizard capable of conjuring a widespread sense of resentment and distrust by relentlessly repeating the same lie, and then using the mass delusion he has spoken into existence as a cudgel with which to hammer the credibility of anyone who denies it. Trump’s remorseless slander of “sanctuary cities” and those who support them is a powerful example of this dark, demagogic art.  

“Sanctuary cities and states like California,” Mr. Trump said in an April White House law enforcement roundtable, “put innocent Americans at the mercy of hardened criminals, hardened murderers …” That sounds pretty bad! What might explain such egregious contempt for public safety? Well, Trump would like you to think that “the Democrats’ priority is to protect criminals, not to do what’s right for our country.” For his part, the president suggests that his honorable aim, unlike the treacherous Democrats’, is “to serve, protect, and defend the citizens of the United States.”

The War on Sanctuary Cities Is Meant to Undermine the Legitimacy of the Opposition Party  

What’s actually going on here is not so hard  to see. The point of the president’s indefatigable mendacity about sanctuary cities is to propagate the lie that the first concern of the opposition party is the unhindered freedom of foreign machete rapists, not the welfare of Americans. The immediate implication of this is that Democratic politicians are traitors who imperil the safety of “real” Americans—the ones who don’t live in sanctuary cities. It hardly needs to be said that a politician or party in the business of treasonously selling out “the people” has no moral right to govern. So Trump doesn’t exactly say it. He just incessantly suggests it

Trump knows that his followers will infer the rest. And they do. For example:

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