Trump Promised Genocide

Don't look away

Many of us compartmentalize in the Trump era. We live our lives trying to do right by family, friends, neighbors, and colleagues. My local classical music radio station this morning tried to drum up donations to its fund drive by encouraging people to turn to the station to escape the news. I know many people who have stopped tracking daily events in order to give themselves a mental health break from the barrage.

But after President Trump’s threat Tuesday — that if his deadline for Iran to open the Strait of Hormuz were not met by 8 p.m., “A whole civilization will die tonight, never to be brought back again” — we must put compartmentalization aside.

These words were different. I want to try to make a case for why.

Some things, once you see them, or once you hear them, can never be unseen or unheard. What exactly occurred? There is some danger that the broad cultural degradation of language will lead us to miss the significance.

Trump’s callous abusiveness has been plain to most of us even since the “Access Hollywood” tape surfaced in October 2016. Some of us heard it even sooner, as when in December 2015 he said about fighting terrorists, “You have to take out their families.” For more than a decade, his logorrhea has filled our airwaves and our minds with insults, gaslighting delusions, racist memes, racialist fantasies, and sheer falsehood. His mind is a nasty place, and he’s thrown the doors to it wide open and asked us all to move inside.

There is a long list of ways people have made their peace with this invitation. Some shut out the news. Others tell themselves things like: “Take Trump seriously but not literally.” “The bluster and unpredictability give him negotiating leverage.” “He may be a bully but at least he’s our bully, sticking up for America.” “Don’t worry; Trump always chickens out.” “The character is awful, but I like the policies.” “Oh, it’s just hyperbole.”

We choose our preferred mantra and whisper it, then try to go on with our lives, pretending the torrent of vicious words doesn’t matter. We shrug when Trump drops an f-bomb via Truth Social, as part of negotiating with Iran: After all, kindergartners drop f-bombs these days. That’s the broad degradation of language that we have accepted.

But Tuesday was different. The president used a threat of genocide not to whip up a rally crowd, not to insult a political opponent, and not to offer colorful commentary on some policy or other. He did it as an act of statecraft.

Remember that a threat is equally a promise. As a question of statecraft, President Trump promised a genocide. This means he said to the world, “America’s tools of statecraft include genocide.” The words were delivered in an exchange constituting a negotiation. They were words that did things, not merely expressed things. Threats from a person with access to nuclear weapons issued in the context of a negotiation must be taken literally. None of the usual hand-waving ways of looking past his words pertain.

This time the president did not speak for himself; he spoke for America. Because his statement was literally a part of a statecraft announcement, it had a different status than the many other things we have heard. He treated Denmark and Greenland badly, too. There, too, he put his abusive language to work for purposes of statecraft. But those cases did not involve a promise of genocide.

Sadly, our country is not innocent of genocide. Andrew Jackson wrote to the Cherokees as the country moved toward the policy of Indian removal: “I have no motive, my friends, to deceive you. I am sincerely desirous to promote your welfare. Listen to me, therefore, while I tell you that you cannot remain where you now are. Circumstances that cannot be controlled, and which are beyond the reach of human laws, render it impossible that you can flourish in the midst of a civilized community. You have but one remedy within your reach. And that is, to remove to the West and join your countrymen, who are already established there. And the sooner you do this, the sooner you will commence your career of improvement and prosperity. ... The fate of your women and children, the fate of your people, to the remotest generation, depend on the issue.”

America has just once again identified genocide as one of its policy options. This is what we cannot unsee.

We cannot live with this. I know I can’t. So here’s my ask: If you have a relative with whom you have stopped discussing politics to keep the peace, the time is here to say something. What might we say? “The President has just broken with the character of America. Would you agree that we do not want America to count genocide among her tools? If that’s the case, then please call your congressman and let them know you do not support the president’s new approach to foreign policy. We are the nation dedicated to the proposition that all people are created equal and deserve protection of their fundamental human rights.”

You may not get a positive response. But only if we all say something about this one do we stand a chance of puncturing the obsequious surround-sound bubble around the president that makes this all so much worse.