The bigger argument doesn’t rely on facts.
Fact-checking racist tweets is only so useful. But it is really, really enticing.
When the president suggested four U.S. Representatives “go back” to other countries he offered the kind of red meat few can resist. Not that resisting that impulse is actually better. It is not.
But many people are caught up in specific parts of the tweets. They aren’t treating it like he’s making a single, cogent argument. But the racist sum is far more potent than any of its parts.
So let’s name the most significant ways this matters.
1. Telling someone to leave the country isn’t an earnest argument.
We shouldn’t have to say it, but hypocritical hyperbole isn’t a reasoned argument offered by an honest debater. It’s what super-patriots shout to out-American someone. Evidence #1 is that the closed-borders patriot suggests their opponent do something that they ideologically oppose.
The logic should be plain, but it bears spelling out. If someone wants our borders to be “locked down” then suggesting someone leave is about as reasonable as telling a person with no food to go buy some food after stealing their money. And what they first said to you was “Hey! Give me my money back!”
This is a necessary starting place before the racist parts because it is also a kind of LIFO (Last In First Out) argument for why these tweets are both serious and not serious.
Whether to take these tweets at their word all depends on whether you support them or not. If you support them, they become serious and reasonable. If not, they become hyperbolic rhetoric. And therefore easily ignored. But the difference is only in the eye of the supporter.
2. “Go back” escalates the “leave the country” argument
For white nationalists, arguing that a citizen “go back” is an extension of the above hyperbole. And it functions much the same way. Most importantly, it serves to set up the plausible deniability they will want to use later.
3. Citizenship is the requirement for leadership, not native birth.
Trump’s tweets directly suggest that the place of birth for a member of Congress should be a marker of differentiation.
While three of the four members of congress targeted were born in the United States, this “mistake” is a red herring. Birthplace isn’t the point. So the fact that one is a refugee from Somalia does not make her less qualified to represent her district. But that’s the wiggle room.
This view of ethnic heritage affecting qualification is central to Trump’s argument. Recall his earlier statement about a judge who would likely be partial against him because of his ethnic background.
While it may be tempting to fact-check the birthplace of these members of Congress, it does little but underscore the argument’s purpose.
4. Trump wants you to think the children or grandchildren of immigrants are also immigrants.
The thrust of the tweets relies on this confusion. It wants immigration status to be indecipherable from an ethnic background.
Leadership isn’t a matter of assimilation. And the immigration status of these women isn’t up for debate. At all. But if we blur the lines a little, and get people thinking of immigration more broadly, then it clearly stops being about actual immigration. Ethnic background becomes the same as immigration status.
This isn’t a logical or innocent conclusion free of animus. This is rooted in ethnonationalism.
5. These tweets activate white nationalist tropes.
As Adam Serwer describes it in The Atlantic
“He was stating his ideological belief that American citizenship is fundamentally racial, that only white people can truly be citizens, and that people of color, immigrants in particular, are only conditionally American. This is a cornerstone of white nationalism , and one of the president’s few closely held ideological beliefs. It is a moral conviction, not a statement of fact.”
And the key to white nationalism, from the founding of the KKK to now, is plausible deniability.
6. It is the sum, rather than the parts, that does the real damage.
Apologists will talk about the president’s hyperbolic style. We have already established that he believes in “telling it like it is.” Which itself should reveal the gravity of describing white supremacy as “telling it like it is.” This is a far more dangerous euphemism than we want to consider.
They will try to separate the question of one’s birthplace from race. Even as the argument actually tries to link the two.
And we’ll hear how we certainly support the laws of the land and perhaps more citizenship tests should be part of the conversation. This makes it all sound normal and reasonable.
He even managed to single out four women of color, but not specifically say the specific words: race, black, minority, or skin color. Plausible deniability.
Notice how many will point out that he didn’t “talk about race.” Even though race was everywhere in the tweets. Race was invoked and implied. And we dare not allow this to be minimized. Because the whole set of tweets would be gibberish without our connecting the dots between race, ethnicity, and national identity.
This is the plane’s black box vigorously defended. It is the white nationalist’s central thesis and why the whole argument needs to be made here.
7. They refuse to accept the sum as evidence of racism.
The hallmarks of a white nationalist dog whistle fill these tweets. It’s all there: his dishonesty about birth and citizenship, condescension toward other countries, and anti-immigrant policies. The tweets are plainly racist.
But, of course, we must remember that plausible deniability!
And if we define racism as demonstrating intent to harm (which also involves reading people’s minds) it doesn’t take long to see how this works.
If we only offer the fact-check, then it becomes a question of logistics. Or if we only focus on the crudeness of his language, we’ll be talking about manner rather than its substance.
But most importantly, his misrepresenting the heritage of these four members of Congress isn’t the whole of the story. And it isn’t the singular thing that makes his comments racist.
He isn’t just being racist.
These are the arguments of white supremacy, which obscures its racist intent by minimizing our standards. So his defenders want us to separate our responses into pieces. And that’s the play right there.
Jim Crow didn’t thrive in the 20th Century because white supremacists convinced everyone to be racist. It thrived because it got white people to establish plausible deniability for the racists in their midst. Rather than see the direct racism in front of them, the indirect racism of the sub-arguments didn’t sound as bad.
We often miss the forest of racism for the trees.
Here are all the outcomes of racism around us, but we’re confused about how we got here. We can see all the infrastructure which provides those outcomes and argue that they don’t individually rise to that standard.
At the 20,000 foot view, we can tell it’s ridiculous. But down in the weeds, we’re just trying to make sense of it.
That is why we must acknowledge Trump is using one argument with multiple racist parts. And all the parts connect as one to dehumanize these four women of color.
All of this excites white nationalists to engage in ethnonationalism. And it encourages the many to argue the merits of each part. But the power resides in the whole argument. Deep down, we know that’s true.
Arguments like Trump’s “go back” don’t make any of us freer. Nor does protecting them on principal. They are antithetical to a free and democratic United States. And there is no defense for what his words intend.