CommentsTONY CASTRO’S AMERICA-I stopped watching the Presidential debate Tuesday night after the first few minutes when it became apparent that Donald Trump had maintained enough self-control to not pull out his White House machete,
slash the throat of moderator Chris Wallace and be about to do the same to Joe Biden only to have a Secret Service sharpshooter put a bullet through his head which would have been for certain how we would have seen the last of this murdering, traitorous, tax-cheating scoundrel who has proven better than Houdini when it comes to escaping death or the most embarrassing personal humiliation since Putin and the Russians put him in office almost four years ago.
This became apparent in early February 2017 when the 45th President of the United States, trudged around the Oval Office a little over a month after his inauguration while preparing his first address to a joint session of Congress. Son-in-law Jared Kushner and adviser Stephen Miller were with the president as he practiced some scathing, campaign-style rhetoric on immigration that he said would cause his audience to go wild. He read aloud the names of criminals and their crimes — rapes, murders, drug dealers — felons he said he was planning to toss about in his speech. They were all Hispanic names, and the president seemed to relish saying each with an anglicized pronunciation.
Trump told the two men that the tough talk on illegal immigrants was irresistible red meat for his Make America Great Again base and predicted the audience would go wild when he talked about tossing them out of the country. Kushner and Miller reportedly laughed aloud at the president’s performance, but then that would have been expected. Trump was accustomed to such immediate support from Kushner, his senior adviser and daughter Ivanka’s husband of almost a decade. Miller was an anti-immigration hardliner and a chief champion of the Trump administration's decision to separate migrant children from their parents who entered the country illegally, as a policy that would deter migrants from coming to the United States. It was only when other White House aides heard of Trump’s plans to double-down on his anti-immigrant stance that the president reluctantly agreed with their suggestions that he tone down the blistering rhetoric on Latino immigrants that he would deliver to America in the nation’s Capital.
Although he would back off on his criticism that night, this marked the moment that the Trump presidency became the most anti-Latino administration that the United States has ever had — or, at least, since President James K. Polk who incited war with Mexico over border disputes and demanded Mexico pay reparations. In settling a three- year war, Mexico was forced to cede to the U.S. a third of what had previously been Mexican sovereign territory, including what today includes California and the Southwest.
Polk’s aggression to accomplish what became known as the “Manifest Destiny” expansion of the nation was criticized by many, among them Abraham Lincoln who said: “I more than suspect that he is deeply conscious of being in the wrong — that he feels the blood of this [the Mexican] war, like the blood of Abel, is crying to heaven against him. . . He is a bewildered, confounded and miserably perplexed man.” It was President Polk then who would be the architect of the subsequent adversarial relationship that the U.S. has had with Mexico and, effectively, with Latin America for the better part of two centuries. His administration’s dealings with Mexico would also set in the motion the longstanding history of racism and discrimination suffered by Latino American citizens at the hands of whites in the U.S.
“James K. Polk,” the late Mexican author and diplomat Carlos Fuentes told Harvard University’s Kennedy Institute of Politics in a 1976 discussion on U.S-Mexican relations, “will go down as history’s worst disaster for Latinos.”
Now, however, Donald Trump is challenging for that dubious distinction.
And, being biblical in the wording, President Polk begat President Trump, who infuriated Latinos from the moment he announced his candidacy. As Latino author Daniel Cubias put it:
“America has never had a president who hated Latinos more,” Cubias assessed in his blog in a conclusion undoubtedly shared by countless Latinos. “And yes, I’m including James K. Polk, who provoked the Mexican-American War solely so the United States could grab the West Coast.”
But in that address to Congress, Trump still continued his plans to deport undocumented immigrants and build a wall on the U.S.-Mexico border, a campaign he has continued to wage. Trump’s rhetoric had not been the mere political hubris of a candidate saying whatever he had to say to win the presidency, disagreeable as such a tactic might be. This had been no political act.
When the billionaire developer descended the Trump Tower escalator in June 2015 to announce his candidacy, what he had said in disparaging Latinos and Mexican immigrants was exactly who and what he was.
“When Mexico sends its people, they’re not sending their best. They’re not sending you. They’re not sending you. They’re sending people that have lots of problems, and they’re bringing those problems with us. They’re bringing drugs. They’re bringing crime. They’re rapists. And some, I assume, are good people... It’s coming from more than Mexico. It’s coming from all over South and Latin America... I would build a great wall, and nobody builds walls better than me, believe me, and I’ll build them very inexpensively, I will build a great, great wall on our southern border. And I will have Mexico pay for that wall. Mark my words.”
The racism and white nationalism that has been drawn to the surface by — and indeed, defines — the Trump administration truly has come to be commonplace in America. And debasing Latino communities has been Trump's calling card since the first minutes of his presidential campaign. In the Oval Office, too, Trump began amping up this dehumanization, using the word “animals” in speeches and tweets to refer to Latinos affiliated with the street gang MS-13, while also launching a White House web page that used ‘animals” again no fewer than eleven times to refer to them. This was the same president who called white supremacists at a racist rally in Charlottesville, Virginia, “very fine people.” He was also a president whose repeated use of degrading and hate- filled rhetoric could no longer be seen as situational — aimed only at what he offensively termed during his campaign and early presidency as “bad hombres.”
This was a president who was a racist tyrant pure and simple. “Yes, he is an angry, racist bag of sins,” journalist Charles P. Pierce, author of Idiot America, I opined in Esquire magazine. “Yes, too much of his staff is made up of racist bags of sin. Yes, too many of his supporters are angry, racist bags of sin. Yes, too many of the people in his political party are perfectly fine with angry, racist bags of sin.”
Indeed, Trump’s words and policies reflect deeply rooted hatred toward marginalized Americans. He has demonstrated that repeatedly in his term, but he has shown that especially with Latinos. And why not. Since the time of President Polk in the 1840s, Latinos have been easy targets in America, ideal victims who don’t fight back too much when pushed around. The Polk administration not only took away by force the territory that comprises the southwest United States from Mexico but also created a national hero in Zachary Taylor, the general who led the U.S. conquest — and who succeeded Polk as 12th president of the nation.
Among generations of Latin Americans, the war waged by the U.S. against Mexico from 1846 to 1848 helped to cement the image of the United States as an arrogant, aggressive, and imperialist country, poisoning relations between a young America and its southern neighbors. In his memoirs, President Ulysses S. Grant, who was a young second lieutenant in the U.S.-Mexican War, called it “one of the most unjust ever waged by a stronger against a weaker nation. It was an instance of a republic following the bad example of European monarchies, in not considering justice in their desire to acquire additional territory.”
It would be the start of a historically bad relationship in which the United States would take advantage of Mexico at virtually every opportunity. Over the next 170 years, America also created the racist myth of the violent Mexican that many politicians masterfully exploited, playing to long-held visions of Mexico as a nation defined by crime to further their political agenda. In this, Donald Trump was only the latest, though possibly the best. Demagoguery, as it turned out, was almost second nature to him.
As a child he had been enchanted not by fairy tales but by movies and television shows of cowboys and bad hombres. In Mexicans, he found his perfect bad guys. The image of violent Mexicans was one that could traced back to 19th-century legends about bandits robbing coach travelers between Veracruz and Mexico City, to the images of Pancho Villa or other revolutionaries in the early twentieth century, and more recently, to the threat of narcotics traffickers. Meanwhile, the U.S.-Mexican War — known in Mexico as the North American Invasion — had spawned a largely overlooked wave of violence by white Americans against Latinos.
From 1848 to 1928, at least 232 people of Mexican descent were killed by mob violence or lynchings in Texas — some committed at the hands of Texas Rangers, according to research by William D. Carrigan and Clive Webb, authors of Forgotten Dead: Mob Violence Against Mexicans in the United States. Texas led twelve states in the southwest in killings of Mexicans and Mexican Americans, the authors documented. Moreover, the war and its aftermath ultimately created the Latino minority in the new America. In 1848, some one hundred thousand Spanish-speaking Mexicans were residing in what had suddenly become the United States.
The U.S. and Mexican governments agreed to give the members of this stranded population a choice: they could move back to Mexico and maintain their Mexican citizenship, remain in the United States while still retaining their Mexican citizenship, or stay in the United States and eventually gain U.S. citizenship at some unspecified future date. Most elected to stay and try their chances in the United States, where they quickly became an ethnic minority in their homeland, confronting discrimination and violations of their civil and property rights. But their status as full-fledged Americans was tenuous at best; and, due to a variety of legal and political maneuvers, Mexican Americans were largely confined to a second-class status. As syndicated columnist Ruben Navarrette Jr. observed in a study:
“When it comes to the aftermath of the U.S.-Mexican war, which lasted from 1846 to 1848 and resulted in the United States seizing half of Mexico's territory — the modern-day U.S. Southwest — Mexicans’ memories are long, and forgiveness isn’t easy to find. Even after all these years, in diplomatic circles, you still hear talk of the ‘sovereignty’ issue — which, loosely defined, means the constant effort by Mexico to keep the United States from meddling in its domestic affairs and the need for the U.S. to tread lightly.”
Admittedly, then, Donald Trump and his administration didn’t invent racist and xenophobic policies or practices, since countless American leaders and prior administrations have also demonized and scapegoated immigrants throughout U.S. history. It has fallen on President Trump, though, to so antagonize Latinos through his volatile, racist rhetoric that at the 2018 mid-term elections he did something that no other politician was able to do. He galvanized Latino voters, who historically have been known for poor turnouts at the polls especially in mid-term elections. Numerous polling and survey organizations predicted a record Latino voter turnout in the Nov. 6 elections that almost returned control of the Senate and the House of Representatives to Democrats, all in protest of the Trump presidency.
Donald Trump, however, had done more than simply energize Latino voters into exercising their electoral power though the peaceful demonstration at the polls. Through the hatred and racism he had preached, his insensitivity to the victims of Hurricane Maria in Puerto Rico, the hard-line immigration policies he had put in place, and mostly his demonizing rhetoric, he had incurred the barbaric loathing of the only group of Latinos unlawful and uncivilized enough to consider what to others would be the unthinkable.
Donald Trump had put his life in the cross hairs of the MS-13 gang that he had elevated to the status that the Mafia had occupied in America in the mid-20th century.
In Los Angeles, where the famed Sunset Strip narrows into an unkempt, trash-strewn area that bears little resemblance to the glamorous end of the boulevard, lies a no- man’s area of Hollywood where violent crime is the highest in the city. It is also the home turf of MS-13 — or Mara Salvatrucha — a primarily El Salvador-based gang that started in Los Angeles and is now believed to have about 10,000 members across the country and Central America. It is unlike any gang in the city, or the country for that matter. They are known for spectacular violence: hacking enemies to death, executing people in broad daylight in view of witnesses, and fatally beating people with bats.
In 2012 under President Barack Obama, MS-13 was formally designated a transnational criminal organization by the Treasury Department. Newsweek magazine ran a cover story about the group, citing its huge membership, under the headline, “The most dangerous gang in America.” When he set out on his presidential campaign, Donald Trump was fixated on MS-13 without knowing much more about the gang than its reputation. “These aren't people,” he told one gathering of reporters. “These are animals.” He would continue to call the gang “animals,” even after cautioned by even his harshest critics. What he didn’t understand perhaps was just how frightened even his Latino detractors had become of this gang.
In his campaign to toughen immigration laws and build a wall at the southern border, President Trump made the deadly gang the central piece of evidence in his argument and to scare Americans into harsh new immigration restrictions. In his 2018 State of the Union, as part of his administration’s campaign against MS-13 gang violence, Trump recognized grieving New York mother Evelyn Rodriguez whose 16- year-old daughter Kayla Cuevas had been slashed and beaten to death with machetes and baseball bats by MS-13 members in 2016. Why had Kayla been so viciously murdered? She had been feuding with MS-13 members at school and on social media.
Trump had been taken a special interest in Kayla’s killing, having read about it in the New York newspapers since it happened, just as his campaign with Hillary Clinton took root. The story apparently stuck in the president’s craw. Then late in the year, basking in his stunning election at his Manhattan penthouse, the president-elect was sitting for Time magazine’s Person of the Year interview when one of the magazine’s reporters reporter read to Trump one of President Barack Obama’s oft-stated quotes about trying to appeal to the country’s better angels and to fight its tribal instincts.
As if on cue, Trump stopped the interview and excused himself from his towering dining room to go to his living quarters upstairs. He returned moments later with that morning’s copy of Newsday,the Long Island tabloid. He couldn’t wait to show Scherer a headline. “EXTREMELY VIOLENT’ GANG FACTION” and the article about murders in all linked to MS-13. According to the story, the gang found Cuevas and a friend walking along a suburban cul-de-sac and beat them with baseball bats and hacked at them with machetes. “They come from Central America,” Trump said to the magazine reporters. “They’re tougher than any people you’ve ever met. They’re killing and raping everybody out there. They’re illegal... Well, hey, look, this is bad stuff. They slice them up, they carve their initials in the girl’s forehead, O.K. What are we supposed to do? Be nice about it?”
Kayla Cuevas’ brutal murder stayed with Trump, and in early 2018 he directed his staff to locate the families of Kayla Cuevas and other victims and to invite them to be his guests at his address to Congress. Since Cuevas’ attack, Suffolk County Police arrested 13 adult members of MS-13, four of whom were charged in Kayla’s death. Three of those four were undocumented immigrants. Evelyn Rodriguez met with the president before his address in which he acknowledged her and the parents of other MS-13 victims.
“There are days where you feel like you want your world to end, just like your child’s,” Rodriguez reportedly told the president. “Then you realize you have a new purpose: to fight, so that your child’s death is not in vain.”
Trump responding by telling Congress and the nation:
“Tonight, I am calling on the Congress to finally close the deadly loopholes that have allowed MS-13 and other criminal gangs to break into our country.”
But in designating MS-13 as a national priority for the Justice Department and simultaneously again stepping up anti-immigration rhetoric and raids of Latino communities, the Trump administration was only encouraging the gang and others like it to flourish in the U.S.
And flourish MS-13 has, from its roots in Los Angeles to every American city and state with any significant Latino population, which is almost everywhere. Two gang members beat and hacked a 16-year-old Houston teen to death using bats and machetes. They also almost decapitated him, the Houston Chronicle reported. In 2017, as many as ten MS-13 members stabbed a man more than 100 times in Maryland. They decapitated him and cut out his heart. That same year, MS-13 members shot a 15-year-old girl in the head and chest, leaving her body in the middle of a busy street in Houston’s Chinatown. The murderer said he killed her to appease Satan. “The beast did not want a material offering,” he said, “but wanted a soul.” On Long Island, MS-13 is believed to be responsible for at least 25 murders in the last two years alone.
Just weeks after the State of the Union, Trump intensified his campaign against MS-13 by going to Long Island, where he addressed immigration and efforts to eliminate the notorious gang. The president also took part in a roundtable discussion with federal and local law enforcement, elected officials, and families of some of the violent gang’s victims.
“It’s a ruthless gang that has violated our borders and transformed once peaceful neighborhoods into blood-stained killing fields,” he said. Then, in responding to a question about the gang, he again raised eyebrows.
“You wouldn’t believe how bad these people are,” he said. “They’re not people. They’re animals.”
At the same time, the White House also released a fact sheet titled, “What You Need To Know About The Violent Animals of MS-13.”
In his push for better border security, law enforcement officers who are on the front lines of fighting the street gang joined Trump at his appearance. In the following weeks, according to authorities, MS-13 members turned their attention to law enforcement. Police in Nassau County in Long Island alone said they had received multiple gang-related death threats against its officers that were being taken seriously.
In the late summer of 2018, in the immigrant communities of Los Angeles, a frightening rumor began circulating, traced back to the MS-13 hotbed off Sunset Boulevard in east Hollywood. Within the law enforcement network of sources that monitor gang activity in Los Angeles, there emerged a report of one MS-13 group wanting to do more than just remove Donald Trump from the presidency. Someone actually wanted to do away with him. It was impossible to gauge the seriousness of the threat.
According to law enforcement officials, MS-13 is an especially difficult criminal organization to crack because it is not a hierarchical organization. The gang is made up of separate cliques with familial ties to Central America and often deals in drug and human trafficking. As is their custom, neither local law enforcement nor federal officials would confirm an investigation of such a threat.
No responsible Latino individual or organization was reportedly linked to this. The rumors might not even have been true, just adolescent trash talking from a criminal element made up heavily of teenagers possibly reacting to the hostility and rhetoric aimed at them from the White House. It was believed that the wave of national attention heaped on MS-13 had made some in the gang jittery, not unlike the widespread panic the Trump administration’s “war on immigrants” had caused among undocumented Latinos. That war includes Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agents apprehending and arresting undocumented immigrants in places such as courts and near schools, which federal officials had not done in the past.
But in the America of Donald Trump, this is the new reality of organized violent crime in the country. According to nationally recognized gang expert Jorja Leap, a professor of social welfare at UCLA who has studied MS-13, constantly citing the danger of MS-13, as Trump is doing, could backfire. Having the President of the United States broadcasting the gang’s brutality and power could possibly heighten MS-13’s recruiting and its own over-confidence. “What Trump is doing in promoting them is dangerous in so many ways,” Leap said. “Along with being erroneous, he is giving them oxygen. Donald Trump is acting as a one-man publicity band for MS-13.”
Against that backdrop the fate of Evelyn Rodriguez only added to the drama. A registered Democrat raised in the South Bronx and Puerto Rico before moving to Long Island with her family, she had become a leading advocate to stop the terror of MS-13. In early 2018, she had been named to the transition team for the newly elected district attorney of Suffolk County, Timothy D. Sini. She also had been working closely with Suffolk County Police Department, which had recently received a $500,000 grant to fight gang violence and to create programs for gang prevention.
But six months after being recognized by the president at the State of the Union in the nation’s capital, Rodriguez was dead. In Long Island, at the exact place where her daughter’s body was found two years ago to the day, Rodriguez was holding a vigil near the site where Cuevas’ body was dumped, the second anniversary of her daughter’s death. Earlier she had set up a shrine there for Kayla, including pictures, votive candles, and balloons. When she returned shortly before the start of the vigil, Rodriguez discovered that the shrine was gone.
According to witnesses, a nearby property owner — infuriated because she believed the memorial was interfering with her ability to sell her lot — had dismantled the tribute. Footage recorded by a local television outlet showed Rodriguez confronting the driver of a white sports utility vehicle who was apparently the person who tore down the shrine. Rodriguez and the driver can be seen arguing when the vehicle accelerates, running over the grieving mother. Law enforcement officials have not filed charges and only said that an investigation was continuing. They definitively ruled out any connection between MS-13 and Rodriguez’s death or any indication that the crash that it was retribution by the gang.
“It’s a tragedy beyond belief,” said U.S. Rep. Peter King, R-N.Y., who had worked with Rodriguez on an anti-gang violence. “Everyone is in shock. What more could happen to one woman?”
So, the tyranny of Donald Trump and the campaign of racism and discrimination that he waged against Latinos to win the presidency in 2016 continues in his oppressive despotism to the virtual eve of the 2020 election. Ultimately, this age of Trump will be bookended by the Time magazine cover of the crying immigrant child at the authoritarian president’s feet — a political tyrant who forced thousands of immigrant children to be separated from their parents at the U.S.- Mexico border — and his insanely false denial that almost 3,000 Puerto Ricans, all Americans, died in the 2017 hurricane that devastated the island.
The Trump presidency as nothing less than a racist war against Latinos, whom he cast as rapists, murderers, violent gang members, job stealers uninterested in learning English, and undocumented immigrants who come to the U.S. and have so-called anchor babies, children who are American citizens at birth. It is part of a systemic racism in this country against Latinos and people of color that is the backdrop of a presidential campaign that, for the most part, ignores the issue, eve as Trump, fanning the fears of white nationalists and racists, continues to play to national resentment over immigration to fuel the unwarranted political paranoia that sent Trump to the White House in a stunningly controversial election four years ago and could possibly do the same again in November.
Latinos have now reached a critical mass in many parts of America, and the Latino boom of almost 60 million, or nearly 18 percent of the population, a six-fold increase since 1970 — the largest immigrant group in American history — has catapulted them into the forefront of the American dialogue, except in this national presidential campaign.
Instead, we get tepid theater like Tuesday night’s debate, which as the New York Times poignantly observed, was chaotic only in the “crosstalk and mockery” with a clownish president trampling decorum in attacking Biden and, of course, going untouched in the process because as irrational and mad as he is, he is sane enough to keep his own machete holstered and escapes, as always untouched by the niceties he knows how to manipulate.
Even in his last hurrah, he remains the master tactician of hatred, racism and monstrous betrayal of what once made America great.
(Tony Castro, the author of seven books, can be reached at [email protected]. This appeared on Tony Castro’s America.) Prepped for CityWatch by Linda Abrams.
