Trump wants to recreate a white America that never existed | Rebecca Solnit

Key Highlights

• It’s strikingly clear that the target is not individuals with criminal records.
• It’s anyone and everyone guilty of being brown.
• Native Americans with tribal identification cards, US citizens, people doing crucial work from construction to nursing, military veterans, college students, people sleeping in their own beds, small children: all kinds of residents of this country are under attack.“ICE raids are cruel, inhumane, and do nothing to serve public safety,” declares Zohran Mamdani, the New York City mayor-elect.
• Masked thugs smashing car windows and dragging parents away from their babies, terrorizing whole swathes of the population, and interfering with the ability of schools and businesses to function does the opposite.
• The rounds of targeted hatred by Trump and his minions – for people from Haiti during the 2024 campaign, for people from Venezuela this spring and summer, and most recently for people from Somalia – rely on defamatory lies and insults, because the facts about these groups don’t support the hate. This terrorizing and demonizing pretends to be in service of recreating a white America that never existed.