Why are we arguing about something any second grader has already settled after looking around the classroom and realizing that nearly every other child is a descendant of someone from a foreign land?
Read the resolution the House of Representatives passed on Tuesday, citing Ronald Reagan, John F. Kennedy and Benjamin Franklin, and quoting Franklin Roosevelt’s call to “remember always, that all of us, and you and I especially, are descended from immigrants and revolutionists.” It’s the kind of immigrants-make-a-nation-stronger boilerplate that would normally pass the House with unanimous consent, but it drew only four Republican votes.
This is how low Trump has taken us. We are a debased nation fighting over the scraps of our former principles. Should someone offer a resolution saluting the “purple mountain majesties” of the United States, every Republican would vote against it if Trump tweeted against a color that is not orange. Senator Mitch McConnell, whose immigrant wife is indirectly a target of this sludge, would say, as he did about the “send-her-back chants,” that the president is “on to something.”
I’m against the dismissal of others with the pre-emptive pejorative of “white privilege.” It closes minds and ends conversations. But this is one case where white privilege applies. For Trump’s tweet wasn’t aimed at me. Nor was it directed at his vice president, the cipher and coward Mike Pence, himself an Irish-American.
Trump’s hate blast was directed solely at people of color.
His tweet was the textbook definition of racism. And I should add in the interest of full transparency, I disagree with much of the policy initiatives of the four left-wing congresswomen targeted by Trump. It was wrong and incorrect for them to make Nancy Pelosi’s disagreement with them about race. That episode was another textbook illustration of why the far left has trouble winning a majority.
But let’s leave that discussion for another day. Back in the country from which I came, the Irish appear genuinely perplexed at this American vomiting of principle. Writing in “Irish Times,” Oliver Sears, a British-born resident of Ireland and son of a Polish holocaust survivor, wondered how any immigrant could ever vote for Trump.
I heard a similar thing when I went back: How could Irish-Americans vote for this awful man without becoming traitors to their heritage? For this Ireland has become what America used to be. If only America could be more like this Ireland.
Timothy Egan (@nytegan) is a contributing opinion writer who covers the environment, the American West and politics. He is a winner of the National Book Award and author of the forthcoming “A Pilgrimage to Eternity.”
THE NEW YORK TIMES
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