1. There are few filters between President Donald Trump’s mind and mouth. That is his appeal and his weakness. It is very common that a person’s strengths are also weaknesses. I wish Trump’s tweets and comments were as forthright — as un-PC — as they are now but stated in a sophisticated way. I also wish that cheesecake were not fattening. But just as cheesecake comes with sugar, Donald Trump comes with unsophisticated rhetoric. People are packages, not a la carte menus.The notion that Trump is a racist can be credibly sustained only if one believes that anything remotely critical of anyone with a swarthy complexion is ipso facto racist. Otherwise, the evidence for Trump's alleged racism is gossamer thin, but when you're in the opposition party, and you see everything you've worked for over the past decades being systematically undone, and the country appear to be thriving as a result, I guess you reach for your most trusty weapon, which for some forty years has been the allegation of racism. The trouble is, that tactic is getting increasingly threadbare, and the people who invoke it at every opportunity are looking increasingly foolish.
2. As a rule, a president of the United States should not label countries, let alone continents, “sh**holes.” I don’t know what word the president actually used, but had he used the word “dysfunctional” instead of “sh**hole,” that actually might have been a service to the people of many of these countries. I have been to 20 African countries. Corruption is Africa’s greatest single problem. That’s why those who truly care about Africans, many of whom are terrific people, need to honestly describe the moral state of many or most African countries. What benefit is it to honest, hardworking Africans or Latin Americans or others to deny the endemic corruption of these societies?
As Guatemalan columnist Claudia Nunez wrote on Trump in the Guatemalan newspaper Siglio 21: “The epithets he uses to describe certain groups are unfortunate and exemplify the decadence of the current political scene. But he has also said things that are true, for example, that it is we citizens of migration countries who have accommodated ourselves to the need to export people, as we have calmly allowed excessive levels of corruption to grow for decades.”
3. Though many wonderful immigrants come from the world’s worst places, there is some connection between the moral state of an immigrant’s country and the immigrant’s contribution to America. According to data from the Center for Immigration Studies, 73 percent of households headed by Central American and Mexican immigrants use one or more welfare programs, as do 51 percent of Caribbean immigrants and 48 percent of African immigrants. Contrast that with 32 percent of East Asians and 26 percent of Europeans.
4. The press’s constant description of Trump as a racist, a white supremacist, a fascist, and an anti-Semite has been a Big Lie. It is meant to hurt the president, but it mostly damages the country and the media. To cite the most often provided “evidence” for the president’s racism, the president never said or implied that the neo-Nazis at the infamous Charlottesville, Va, demonstrations were “fine people.” The “fine people” he referred to were the pro- and anti-statue removal demonstrators.
In any case, it's hard to square the imputation of racism to Trump with what Senator Rand Paul describes here:
I suspect that a lot of the criticism that has befallen the president over this latest episode has little to do with his scatological description of these countries, which is surely accurate in its general sense. After all, the chief argument for expanded immigration from the countries to which Mr. Trump was inartfully referring is that the people residing in them are living amidst hellish conditions and that compassion demands we give those poor wretches a chance to escape the horrors to which they're daily subjected.
Indeed, many of those who come here from those lands are willing to risk everything they have, including their lives, to escape them. Why would they do this unless they felt they were escaping a country that offers its people nothing but hopelessness and misery?
Nor does the controversy seem to have much to do with whether we should be admitting so many immigrants from countries wracked with poverty, dysfunction and lack of education. It surely is not in our national interest to open our doors to millions of the world's poor any more than it would be in a family's interest to permanently and indiscriminately open their home to the poor and homeless on their community's streets.
No, the outrage expressed over Trump's choice of words is more about laying hold of one more cudgel with which to beat him over the head than it is about his inveterate poor taste, or racism or whatever.
Here's a thought experiment one can apply to the immigration issue that'll serve as a kind of hypocrisy detector. Imagine that it were believed that all immigrants from third-world countries, whether legal or illegal, were granted citizenship and could reasonably be expected to vote Republican while any immigrants from first-world European countries were likely to vote Democrat. If so, how much enthusiasm would there be right now among Democrats for DACA, for open borders, amnesty and mass immigration from those blighted nations?
I can't prove it, of course, but I suspect that were this the case many Democrats would be clamoring for a border wall, demanding that we expand immigration from Europe and that we impose strict quotas on the immigration of people from the third world who lack skills and education. In other words, if I'm right, much of the outrage over Trump's comment is really about leveraging dissatisfaction and dislike for the president into votes and political power for themselves.
Check out the rest of Prager's comments on this matter at the link. They're very good.
