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No offense intended, but in 2016 we were repeatedly told all of the above would happen if Trump was elected. Trump was elected, and none of it did. In fact, Trump deported fewer people than the previous President, who also first got elected on an aggressive anti-immigration platform, having previously voted in favour of a 700-mile fence along the Mexican border to deter illegal immigration.
In 2016, these predictions about Trump carried weight precisely because he was an unknown quantity: not only had he never been President before, he'd never held an elected office of any kind. That is no longer the case - we lived through four years of a Trump administration and have a very good idea of what to expect from one, and a much better idea of what to expect compared to a Harris administration (unless you believe that Harris has been secretly pulling the strings for the last four years - I mean, obviously someone other than Biden has been calling the shots, but I don't know if I buy that it was Harris all along). If history is any guide, if Trump is elected, his administration will immediately witness a steep drop-off in deportations and repatriations compared to the preceding Democrat administration (Biden expelled 2.8 million migrants in his first two years in office, and "the Biden administration’s nearly 4.4 million repatriations are already more than any single presidential term since the George W. Bush administration").
Put hard numbers on your predictions, the way Scott did in "You Are Still Crying Wolf" (which he subsequently graded). If Trump is elected, how confident are you that literal concentration camps will be constructed; that hate crimes against Hispanic migrants, Muslims or ethnic groups will be significantly higher than during the current administration; that deportations will be significantly higher than under the current administration etc.?
Unrelated to the main thrust of your post, but I make frequent donations to the Uyghur Human Rights Project, and strongly encourage all of you to do the same.
Thank you for your support for the Uyghurs, first of all.
I don't quite see why any of this is relevant to my argument, actually. You don't know me. I'm not asking you to take my word for anything, just trying to alert you to the necessity of looking freshly at what Trump is saying and reevaluating past judgments. No amount of previous mistakes, alarmism, or other rhetorical malfeasance by Democrats can exempt a politician from all scrutiny.
This time around, Trump has the opportunity to be more effective, if he wants to be--he can start fresh with more loyal civil servants and a more ruthless Cabinet, has a more loyal party in Congress, has more experience, has four years of the likes of Stephen Miller making plans now that he knows he actually needs them and can't just order the Deep State to do it. It's not like he deported fewer people because he wanted to deport fewer. He also has rhetorically positioned himself differently--before it was primarily "immigration is dangerous, especially illegal immigration, because it includes bad people, we need to build a wall to keep them out and pause legal channels until we figure out how to filter out the poisonous Skittles better." Now it's "There are tens of millions of evil people newly in this country poisoning our blood with their evil genes, and also by smuggling in literal poison, and whatever other terrible rumor you've heard about them is probably true, so we urgently need to revoke all their legal statuses, round up all suspected illegals, figure out which ones are actual illegals, and deport them." I think this reflects an altered worldview and altered intentions and expectations.
In terms of my personal gut probabilities (with conditional ones indented):
Deportations will be significantly higher than under the previous administration -- 80%
...and deaths in detention will be higher too -- 99%
...and deaths in detention will be later found to have been underreported -- 75%
...that detentions will happen at a scale, brutality, and death rate high enough that most of the world will view it with horror once the truth comes out -- 25%
Trump will revoke temporarily protected statuses granted under the Biden administration -- 80%
...and try to go further with retroactively making people illegal -- 80%
Trump being elected will not increase the number of hate crimes -- 60%
Regardless of whether he wins, he'll call for pogroms more and more explicitly -- 75%
What does "later" mean? During the following administration? Within a decade of Trump taking office? Twenty years?
I think you should put a hard time limit on this prediction, and if no persuasive evidence has been presented to this effect before that time limit expires, you should admit you were mistaken. Without that, this has all the hallmarks of dragon-in-my-garage conspiratorial thinking - "I can't prove that Trump is Literally Hitler, but the evidence proving it will out before long! Any minute now..."
This one is sort of meaningless, because "most of the world" (and half of the US) already views anything Trump says or does with horror. Even if what he's doing is objectively less severe in scale to what Democrat Presidents have done (e.g. the aforementioned greater number of deportations under Obama than Trump).
What, in your opinion, would an explicit call for a pogrom from Trump look like? Do you think any public statements he's made to date could reasonably be characterised as such? If so, which ones?
6 years should be plenty.
Citation needed. Trump is broadly-disliked but controversial. I mean something a bit stronger--that it'll be an uncontroversial entry in lists of atrocities. I could in theory operationalize it with numbers but I won't because I don't want to spend a day going over atrocity statistics.
In my mind it's a continuum, not a binary, hence the "more and more." Especially when it's Trump, with his communication style I feel like he has to say something at least three times before it's uncontroversial to claim that he said it on purpose and meant it. I do think it's pretty reasonable to characterize e.g. this video https://twitter.com/Acyn/status/1840483582433009711 as Trump calling for a pogrom, but the implication is that you're only supposed to get really violent with known thieves who are maybe even actively robbing you. So there's room for it to get worse, if and when he says the same thing but about some conspiracy theory about an ethnic group.
After Trump takes office, or leaves office?
I don't see anything untoward about the claim that you're entitled to defend yourself if someone is trying to steal from you. It may not always be the best idea, and in many cases from a self-preservation perspective one might be better off just taking the L and letting the mugger take your wallet rather than fighting back and risking getting yourself killed. But in terms of ethics, if someone comes up to you on the street and says "give me your wallet or I'll stab you", you are perfectly entitled to defend yourself.
As an aside, the fact that Trump says "if someone's trying to steal from you, you're entitled to defend yourself using force if necessary" and you apparently hear "oh my God he's encouraging people to go out and beat up Hispanic people!" in itself strikes me as more than a little racist.
I don't think he's talking about Hispanic people in that video but I haven't checked. What he is doing, explicitly, is saying that people should break certain rules restraining their violence that they are currently obeying, and get really rough as a deterrent, and the authorities should look the other way.
Be that as it may, there's a world of difference between "authorities should look the other way while ordinary civilians dispense mob justice on the criminals who are victimising the ordinary civilians" and "authorities should look the other way while ordinary civilians go around beating up members of a specific ethnic group". Both assertions are troubling for different reasons, but I can imagine certain specific circumstances in which the former might be defensible (e.g. when the authorities are unable or unwilling to enforce the law themselves and ordinary civilians must choose between taking the law into their own hands or allowing themselves to be victimised - if I owned a grocery shop in the middle of the 1992 LA riots, I probably would have followed the rooftop Koreans' lead). I don't for a moment accept your inference that the former implies the latter. Ergo, I think your claim that Trump was directly calling for a pogrom is ridiculous, unless you're using an extremely expansive definition of "pogrom" in which you're essentially treating "career criminals" as an ethnic group.
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