The Pigsty of Donald Trump

It has been said that if you fight with a pig, you both end up muddy. The difference is that the pig likes to wallow in the mud, but to us, it reeks. For this same reason, you cannot play with it. In conclusion, the pig cannot be the enemy, but it also cannot be your friend.

For Martha, in this bad hour:

Donald Trump has declared war against the Mexican migrants in his country. But, has he only proposed war against them or also against the Mexicans who have not migrated? I am not a migrant, but nevertheless, I feel wronged. As for me, I am not going to leave my country, my children are not going to have their privileges taken away, my property is not going to be seized, and they are not going to incarcerate me. But, nevertheless, it has repulsed me. Like with the pork, I do not fight, but I am disgusted.

Trump is not stuck in a mess, but it appears that he himself is the mess. In the first place, I do not trust his speech — not because of the evident incoherence, but because of its author. I struggle to believe that a New Yorker, a son of New Yorkers and New York resident for life, would be a chauvinist and xenophobic. New York is the most open of all cities in the United States. It is the location on the planet where no one feels foreign. In reality, in New York, no one is foreign.

If such discourse came from a farmer in Indiana or a rancher in Wyoming, one could suppose their sincerity. It is said that these are regions where they do not trust people of other nationalities, other races or beliefs. As if it were not enough, it is from those places that work can be seen as threatened by immigration, no matter where it comes from. But in our New York character of today, his words feel fatty and uncaring.

In the second place, I do not trust his words because they do not appear coherent with his political-electoral purposes, and when someone makes a gaffe, we are obligated to suspect that there exists a hidden but cunning intent.

I say this because it appears that his speech is not directed just against Mexicans, but also against his rivals in the primary for the Republican candidacy, primarily against the Latinists, incarnated in the Texan-Floridian John Ellis Jeb Bush, and in the Cuban-Floridian Marco Rubio.

With this, he advances to the caucus coming up next year and has outdone himself prematurely. But he has the inconvenience that it begins very early and that there will be bumpy times around the Republican Convention. As if it were not enough, his speech appears on track to harvest the rural votes in a country where the rural electorate makes up less than 8 percent of voters. In the United States, farmers do not pick the president. The radical Republicans do not like the national electorate. Barry Goldwater brought them to the worst electoral defeat in the history of the Republican Party. Only moderate Republicans, like Nixon, Reagan and the Bushes, have won.

Finally, his speech is disguised as politics with nationalism, although rancid, but is naked as an anthropology with a racism so rotten. If he only did not like foreigners because he did not want them in his country, we should respect his opinion, although we do not share in it. Nationalists respect what other nations decide for their home.

But his “shoddy” nationalism shakes with real racism because Trump wants to deport the Mexicans, not all foreigners. He does not like Mexicans in the United States. But he also does not like Mexicans in Mexico, nor the Mexicans around the world. It is said he does not like living Mexicans.

It is not a matter of tolerance but of respect. Although, for a lot of people, it is a matter of fears and frights. The most affluent people believe that the poor nations, with their greater population growth, one day will fill the planet, and that the houses of the rich will be full of Latinos, Arabs, Asians, Africans and Hindus. The matter of immigration is tied with that of discrimination.

For us, the dialogue with the United States is of neighbors, although not of friends; of partners, although not comrades; of rich with poor, weak with powerful. But Donald Trump tells of a relation between superiors and inferiors, between those who have been elected and those who have been convicted, between those who exist to be masters and those who were born to be servants.

That and nothing else is the true discourse that really separates us. The border is not a river nor a fence, much less a wall. The true border is us. This human border helps our neighbors to protect themselves but also helps us to defend ourselves. If we collapse, the nation will become defenseless.