The story may be apocryphal, but it’s a good one. It is said that when Sam Goldwyn decided to invest in the film version of “The Children’s Hour”, the first dramatic work of American Lillian Hellman, he was warned by MGM executives that, in the play, the protagonists were lesbians. So they feared that the film industry censors of the time would impose restrictions. The Hollywood boss, the story goes, shrugged his shoulders and moved on:
-What’s the problem? Make the protagonists Albanian.
Not being Americans, they would not tarnish national fiction.
Donald Trump fed voraciously on this artifice, producing a cruel scenario of personal entertainment: the creation of imaginary enemies to consolidate his internal power. Trump’s history of insulting citizens of “shithole countries” or “third world countries,” as he likes to call it, is long and still making headlines. The outbreak of crude nativism and human disgust directed at the Somalis last week, during a White House ministerial meeting, also served its purpose: it obscured the rest of the news. (They just forgot to tell you that Mogadishu-born model and fashion icon Iman made $200 million net as an immigrant to the United States.)
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Insults such as “(Somalis) are trash”, “they only complain”, “they come here straight from hell and complain all the time”, “they stink, we don’t want them here” were uttered. Deputy JD Vance applauded. The presidential press secretary called the president’s speech an “epic moment.” According to the American press, it was the only moment of brilliance capable of keeping Trump awake during the meeting. Additionally, he seemed tired from so much flattery and dozed off during public events. Perhaps because you’ve never looked through The New Yorker magazine, you must not have learned from essayist EB White that “making and keeping enemies is one of the things that consumes the most energy, time, and life” of a human being.
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Trump has made the fight against immigration his most powerful political weapon during this second term. He demonizes the undesirable “other” every time an indigestible subject (Epstein affair, boomerang effect of customs duties, loss of popularity) knocks on the doors of the White House. And, along the way, it destroys 250 years of construction of a society which, even without succeeding, intends to be forged on a plural history, and not on a common ancestry, religion, language or race. The first words of the Constitution of 1789 are “We, the people…”.
But who are these people? The poem “Us and Them,” which Rudyard Kipling wrote in 1917 against British imperial ethnocentrism, sums up the problem in the last stanza: All the good people agree,/And all the good people say:/All the good people, like Us, are Us/And all the rest are Them!/But if you cross the sea,/Instead of crossing the street,/You might end up (think about it!) looking at us/As a type of Them!
In the Trumpian universe, poetry or rhyme are not sought after. For Kristi Noem, the vehement US Secretary of Homeland Security, “it is necessary to completely ban the disgraced countries that are flooding our nation with murderers, leeches and drug addicts.” Robert Pape, a researcher on political violence at the University of Chicago, highlights the dehumanizing nature of the language chosen:
— These are not only vile metaphors, they are particularly dehumanizing — he said in an interview with the New York Times. — When you use the word “trash,” you are not referring to something human, but to something disposable.
Last week, the Trump administration not only suspended the entry of citizens of 19 countries, among the poorest and most unstable in the world. It also stopped granting U.S. citizenship or issuing green cards to previously accepted applications. The new rules could affect more than 1.5 million people with pending asylum applications and more than 50,000 people who received shelter under the previous administration of Democrat Joe Biden.
In this sanitizing chase that aims to deport an average of 3,000 immigrants per day, agents from U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement and the Border Patrol, both subordinate to the Department of Homeland Security, collide in actions that will one day embarrass those who ordered them, executed them, encouraged them, applauded them or pretended not to see them. By January 2026, recruitment, training and placement of 10,000 new eviction officers is underway. Those approved receive a US$50,000 bonus (around R$265,000) and student loan payment waiver, in addition to other benefits. Big Christmas. And infamous.