Clarence Page: President Donald Trump’s obsession with Somali immigrants takes a sinister turn |
Sometimes, one crisis seems to lead to another for President Donald Trump — and he’s got plenty of trouble brewing.
For months now, Trump’s approval rating has taken a beating for the knock-on effects of the government shutdown and the ongoing fiasco over the Jeffrey Epstein files. In November, his administration came under fire over newly reported details about the airstrikes on drug-trafficking suspects in the Caribbean, which seem to indicate that wounded people were deliberately killed in violation of the conventions of war. Trump also responded to the shooting of two National Guard members in Washington — allegedly by an Afghani refugee who had formerly worked with American intelligence in Afghanistan — by suspending all Afghani immigration cases, leading many critics to decry the move as collective punishment.
Amid all this anguish, Trump took the opportunity at a Cabinet meeting Tuesday to advance collective punishment against another immigrant group that he doesn’t like: Somalis.
On Nov. 21, Trump posted on social media that he was revoking temporary protected status for Somalis living in Minnesota.
“They contribute nothing,” Trump told reporters in a rambling tirade in a Tuesday Cabinet meeting. “I don’t want them in our country.”
Trump further averred that the war-torn East African country from which they fled “stinks” and that they are “garbage.”
Even for Trump, who once infamously dismissed African nations and other developing nations as “shithole countries,” the malevolence and vulgarity of his anti-Somali outbursts was stunning.
And what end did he imagine they served?
Casting a broad shadow of suspicion on immigrants from other nations, especially nonwhite and Islamic........