Politics as a Marketing Campaign

Since the multimillionaire Donald Trump announced his intention to run for the Republican presidential nomination, his rhetoric against illegal immigrants and the threat they supposedly represent for the economy and stability of his country has been inseparable from his political platform and his chances of being elected.

“You will find that legal and illegal immigrant convicts are underrepresented in United States penitentiaries, with only a quarter of the number that corresponds to them according to their proportion of the United States population. This means the statistics say that the ‘wetbacks’ are four or five times less likely to commit a crime than your own charming children, Mr. Trump.”*

The above paragraph is part of an open letter addressed to the Republican Party’s presidential candidate, Donald Trump, by Jorge Majfud, Uruguayan writer and professor of Latin-American literature at the U.S. University of Georgia.

He continues, “You see, Mr. Trump, for centuries, long before your grandparents arrived from Germany and made a great success of their business in New York hotels and brothels, and long before your mother arrived from Scotland, Mexican people had families here and had already given names to all the Western states, rivers, valleys, mountains and cities. California architecture and the Texas cowboy, symbols of the authentic North American, are nothing but the hybrid created by the new Anglo-Saxon culture and the long-established Mexican culture.”*

“When your mother arrived in this country in the 1930s, half a million Mexican- Americans were expelled. The majority of them were American citizens but they had the bad luck to be on the receiving end of the nation’s frustration during the Great Depression, which they did not create, and to be perceived as foreigners. Those people had looked like foreigners and rapists (you were not the first to see them that way) since the United States took possession of half of Mexico’s territory in the middle of the 19th century. And because those people, who were there first, went on speaking their barbaric language (Spanish) and refused to change the color of their skin, they were persecuted, expelled, or simply murdered, accused of being bandits, rapists and foreign invaders. The real Zorro was dark and fought, not against Mexican despotism (as Johnston McCulley wrote it, so that he could sell the story to Hollywood), but against the Anglo-Saxon invaders who took the Mexicans’ lands. He was dark and subversive, like Jesus, who in holy paintings is always depicted as fair, blue-eyed and rather deferential. The hegemonic power of the era that crucified him had obvious political reasons for doing so. And it continued to crucify him when, three centuries later, the Christians ceased to be the persecuted illegal immigrants hiding in the catacombs, and became instead the official persecutors of the governing power of the time.”*

“Luckily,” says Majfud, “the European immigrants, like Trump’s parents and his current wife, did not have the appearance of foreigners. Of course, if his mother had arrived forty years earlier she could have been taken for Irish, and the Irish did have the look of invaders.”*

“The creativity of businessmen and women in the United States is admirable,” Majfud goes on to say, “but their importance tends to be exaggerated and we forget that it was not business people who promoted democracy in Latin America, quite the reverse in fact. A number of U.S. companies helped to bring about coups d’état and supported a long list of dictatorships.”*

“They were business people who, like Henry Ford, made interesting contributions to industry, but we should remember that, like many other business people in this country, Ford was openly anti-Semitic and collaborated with Hitler. Consortiums like ALCOA and Texaco collaborated with the fascist regimes of the era and denied refuge to Jews fleeing persecution in Nazi Germany, just as today they deny the same to Muslims.”*

Majfud reminds Trump that much of the basis for today’s scientific knowledge was generated centuries ago by those “horrible, primitive Arabs” to whom we owe the number system we use, algebra, algorithms, and many other sciences and philosophies that form part of contemporary Western culture.

“It was not the businessmen who took part in the acts of resistance and popular struggle that brought about virtually all the progress in civil rights that the United States enjoys today,” says Majfud. “We have other patriots to thank for that, though at the time they were demonized as dangerous, subversive and anti-American.” Majfud concludes: “Mr. Trump, I know that you don’t know so I am going to tell you: A country is not a company. You have been hugely successful in converting American politics (where, since the founding generation, intellectuals never been abundant) into a perfect commercial marketing campaign powered by crude, anti-immigrant rhetoric.”*

*Editor’s note: These quotes, though accurately translated, could not be verified.