Illustration By Carla Labto
By Anahy Gutierrez
A Perspective
“Roses are red, violets are blue. Come here illegally, and we’ll deport you.”
Sounds like an insult from a troll account. It wasn’t.
It was posted on The White House Instagram page.
Really.
Mean-spirited, third-grade rhetoric has been normalized under Trump’s governance. It remains disappointing and disgraceful. Worse, it is slowly strangling our democracy.
Trump’s racist and sexist remarks have been the voice of his persona for years. It would take a reem of paper to print them all, but here are a few of the most notorious:
2005: Trump’s infamous “grab ‘em by the pussy” comment was captured on a hot mic.
2006: “If Ivanka weren’t my daughter, perhaps I’d be dating her,” Trump said on a talk show.
2012: Asked what he had in common with his daughter, Trump says, “Well, I was going to say sex, but I can’t relate that.”
2015: Trump introduced his bizarre idea to build a wall along the entire 2,000-mile southern border.
2016: Trump claimed he saw Muslims cheering when the World Trade Center collapsed on 9/11.
2017: Trump signed an executive order banning seven predominantly Muslim countries from traveling to the U.S.
2018: Trump said it is a “very scary time for young men in America” due to the #metoo movement.
2020: Trump called Covid-19 the “Chinese Virus.”
2021: Trump urged supporters to storm the U.S. Capitol and “fight like Hell.”
2024: Trump said immigrants in Springfield, Ohio were eating people’s pets.
2025: The Trump Administration said ICE could deport individuals without due process.
If all of these mind-bending things are done in public, thinking about what must go on behind closed doors is the stuff of nightmares.
Trump’s 34 felony convictions are ignored by MAGA voters and the entire Republican party. Trump had his lawyer Michael Cohen pay adult film performer Stormy Daniels $130,000 to conceal a sexual affair they had in 2006. This hush money was reimbursed to Cohen through Trump company business checks deceivingly labeled as “legal expenses.”
Offering hush money is not illegal, but falsifying business records to defraud the state of tax revenue is illegal in New York. Trump also engaged in political violations to cover up his affair with Daniels to benefit his 2016 presidential campaign.
Trump’s immoralities bleed into his governance. In his first 100 days he signed 143 Executive Orders – a record. Some lowlights include orders forcing America to acknowledge just two genders, removing DEI from federally-funded institutions, attempts to end birthright citizenship and the establishment of his seat-of-the-pants “Department of Government Efficiency” (DOGE).
The Trump Administration tried to conceal thuggish DOGE activity from Americans through the Presidential Records Act. He wants to withhold the brutal truth from Americans while dismantling our safety net and our society. He dreams of becoming a dictator. He is already a dictator.
Trump’s second term racist anti-immigrant rhetoric has emboldened the already-aggressive ICE and removed all veneer of humanity from America’s most racist agency. ICE now raids vulnerable people in sacrosanct places of worship and schools. Soaring numbers of ICE raids and arrests sow fear in vulnerable communities.
Tariffs on imported goods will hurt the poor by increasing prices of groceries, car parts and electronics. Trump signs papers and makes statements without considering how this will affect our country because his reckless actions do not affect him.
Trump’s Revenge Tour ’25 has him at war with millions of Americans and also with the truth. His post-truthism is right out of the Nazi Joseph Goebbel’s strategies used to elevate, elect and sustain Adolph Hitler in the 1930s and 1940s. “Tell a lie loud enough and long enough and it becomes the truth in the minds of the people.” This malevolent version of the Jedi mind trick has worked on tens of millions of our fellow Americans who no longer trust their own lying eyes and pray at the church of Fox and Trump’s social media supporters. George Orwell’s dystopian novel “1984” was, sadly, right on target and is source material for Trump puppet masters like Steven Miller and Steve Bannon.
Specific targets of the War on Truth are the exceedingly fair-minded public broadcasting networks PBS and NPR. The Trump Administration has also gone after Voice of America and foreign language American broadcasts which provide news of the West to people living under oppressed rulers. VOA’s relentlessly pro-America slant is apparently not good enough for Trump, who thinks it should be a platform to promote him rather than American ideals.
Defunding America’s top public-owned news sources will leave Americans stranded on an island of deception circled by sharks. We may soon be force fed Trump’s firehose of misinformative propaganda with no access to reality. He is degrading and eliminating our rights and freedoms on a daily basis and would prefer not to have our real news media telling us about it.
Trump thinks signing an executive order will automatically and magically make the order valid. That can happen if we allow it. And we have largely been allowing it. Congress and most judges are supplicant to Trump, unable to find their courage.
It is time to fight back. We cannot convince a narcissist like Trump to behave, but we can pressure his allies in Congress. Some Republican Senators and Members of Congress have been hearing about it from constituents (voters) and are slowly backing away from the worst of Trump’s most hateful shenanigans. Trump himself has quietly moved away from a few of his most ill-advised pet projects.
Take enough of an elephant’s food and it will move on.
Millions of Americans have begun to actively protest Trump’s push toward dictatorship. Like the fictional people in the Harry Potter books too timid to say Voldemort out loud, we need to start talking courageously about America’s drift toward dictatorship. We cannot hope to fight it if we will not even say it.
