Hey, there’s a reason why we posted the following meme last week the moment TIME magazine named Donald Trump the 2016 Person of the year:
And as much as we didn’t want to read what TIME wrote about the President-elect, once we did earlier today, we just knew that no matter what, Trump will forever perpetuate the fearful myth of the “criminal” immigrant because fear sells. As the magazine writes:
[Trump] returns a few minutes later with that morning’s copy of Newsday, the Long Island tabloid. The front-page headline reads, “EXTREMELY VIOLENT” GANG FACTION, with an article about a surge of local crime by foreign-born assailants. His point, it seems, is that the world is zero-sum, full of the irredeemable killers that Obama’s idealism fails to see. The details are more compelling than any big picture. “They come from Central America. They’re tougher than any people you’ve ever met,” Trump says. “They’re killing and raping everybody out there. They’re illegal. And they are finished.”
Instead of actually challenging Trump on history and reality and the fact that maybe just maybe the United States’ own freaking policy created the Central American crisis, this is what we get after that paragraph:
A reporter mentions that what Trump is saying echoes the rhetoric of Philippine President Rodrigo Duterte, who has overseen the extrajudicial killing of thousands of alleged drug dealers and users in recent months. The President-elect offers no objection to the comparison. “Well, hey, look, this is bad stuff,” he says. “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?”
Seriously? The Philippines? That’s it. Nothing else.
Trump is getting (once again) the soft pass in pushing the paranoia, in saying that if you are from Central America, you are a vicious rapist gang member. And nothing, just silence from TIME.
Yes, the mainstream media has indeed normalized Trump, and nothing he says will shock them.
But don’t say that we didn’t tell you so last year, because we told you so last year.
