Puerto Ricans Discovered Trump’s Hangman.Will the Rest of America?
Last Sunday night Donald Trump held what has been understood as his “closing argument” rally at Madison Square Garden.
Not surprisingly for a rally that many commentators have pointed out self-consciously evokes the infamous 1939 Nazi rally at Madison Square Garden (see here and here), the featured speakers presented a closing argument that can neatly be summarized as, “We’re haters. Haters gonna hate. Vote for Trump and Vance if you can’t get enough hate.”
Among all the haters who spoke, “comedian” Tony Hinchcliffe perhaps garnered the most attention and roiled the waters of controversy most with his expressions of hate (I won’t say jokes) about Latinos. In one such hate utterance, he referred to Puerto Rico as a “floating island of garbage.”
This is so funny I forgot to laugh. Hinchcliffe, of course, accuses those who don’t find comedic value in his hate as having “no sense of humor.”
Some celebrity Puerto Rican artists also lacked a sense of humor and took to social media almost instantaneously to voice their support for the Harris-Walz ticket.
Global pop star Bad Bunny, for example, took to Instagram, where he has 46 million followers, in support of Harris, posting a clip about Trump’s abandonment of Puerto Rico in the wake of the devastation caused by Hurricane Maria, when Trump delayed $20 billion in relief funding to the island. We can all also probably remember Trump blithely hurling rolls of paper towels at those suffering in Puerto Rico desperately in need of aid, trying to make them scramble for the aid being provided. The man is grotesque!
The “King of Latin Pop” Ricky Martin also communicated with his 18 million followers on Instagram, writing, “This is what they think of us. Vote for @kamalaharris.”
Chart-topping Puerto Rican singer Luis Fonsi chimed in as well, positing to his 16 million followers:
“It’s OK to have different views, and I respect those who think different than me… but going down this RACIST path ain’t it. I’m so proud to be Puertorriqueño, to be Latino!
“We are not OK with this constant hate. It’s been abundantly clear that these people have no respect for us and yet they want our vote.”
That Trump has been courting the Latino vote is indeed true, making the hateful revelations at Trump’s rally appear all the more honest and genuine. If someone speaks against their self-interest, one has to believe it’s absolutely honest, unless Trump and Vance are just courting the self-hating Latinos.
Latinos realized that the Hangman Trump is coming for them.
If someone represents you as trash (recalling pejoratives like “white trash”) and tries to get others to see you as less than human, you know that person has nothing good in store for you and is trying to desensitize others to acts of violence that might be inflicted on you–even to set the stage for inflicting violence against you and having nobody care or stand up. This kind of language represents you as disposable, as a life that doesn’t matter.
And while it’s great that Fonsi, as a Puerto Rican, spoke up for Latinos, insisting “we are not OK with this constant hate” and pointing out that “these people have no respect for us,” we all need to be speaking out not just for groups we identify with or belong to but for any peoples subject to hate.
We have seen “Don’t Say Gay” bans in Florida and other anti-LGBTQ legislation around the country, especially geared toward assaulting the rights of transgender people. The attacks on women’s reproductive rights are essentially acts of hate. Efforts to undermine DEI initiatives are acts of hate against people of color. Trump’s and Vance’s immigrant-hating couldn’t be clearer, with the lies they’ve told about Haitian immigrants in Springfield, Ohio–and let’s not forget let’s never forget, about Trump’s policies that separated families and caged children at the border. Again–GROTESQUE!
But we all need to realize that if Trump and Vance are willing to put kids in cages, they won’t have an issue with doing it to you either. As Martin Luther King, Jr. tried to tell us, “An injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere.” King struggled mightily to get us to see that if we allow others to be treated unjustly and simply stand by, it could easily happen to us as well. We need to be wary of distancing ourselves from these injustices and adopting the position of relief or thankfulness that it isn’t us and, worse, adopting the position that those trashy people deserve it or don’t matter.
It would help us to remember Maurice Ogden’s famous 1951 poem “Hangman” to clarify our most pressing challenge for the day.
In this poem, a hangman comes to town and sets up a gallows. He invites the speaker of the poem to first help him hang an “alien,” and the speaker recounts how he and others in town responded:
And he stepped down, and laid his hand
On a man who came from another land-
And we breathed again, for another's grief
At the Hangman's hand was our relief.
This pattern repeats as a Jew is hanged and then a Black person and so on until nobody is remaining except the poem’s speaker, who then berates the Hangman for supposedly tricking him, for not showing him the favor he had mistakenly thought the Hangman showed him:
"You tricked me, Hangman!" I shouted then,
"That your scaffold was built for other men …
And I no henchman of yours," I cried,
"You lied to me, Hangman, foully lied!"
Then a twinkle grew in the buckshot eye:
"Lied to you? Tricked you?" he said, "Not I,
For I answered straight and I told you true:
The scaffold was raised for none but you.”
And the dialogue between the speaker and the Hangman continues, as the Hangman reminds the speaker that he is in fact complicit in the murders:
"For who has served me more faithfully
Than you with your coward's hope? Said he,
"And where are the others that might have stood
Side by your side in the common good?"
"Dead," I whispered; and amiably
"Murdered," the Hangman corrected me;
"First the alien, then the Jew …
I did no more than you let me do.
This haunting poem must guide us now.
Puerto Ricans discovered in Trump and Vance the Hangman coming for them, but we all need to see that the hate informing the Trump-Vance campaign is not reserved for any one group. You don’t even have to look that closely to see through this illusion that only certain groups–certain “others” and not “us”-- are the targets of their hate.
Let’s not speak up only when the hate is directed against an identity group with whom we don’t directly identify, whether it be LGBTQ people, women, racial minorities, whoever.
Instead, know that you are in line to be targeted and fight against hate for the common good.
Trump and Vance can only do what we collectively let them do. We can stop the hate now on November 5 and start the process of working this poison out of the body politic.