To borrow a famous phrase from another American president, no one should ever misunderestimate the capacity for idiocy of Donald J Trump.
You’d think we’d be used to it by now – but today we’re coming to terms with another Trump travel ban, the embarrassment of which has been amplified by his decision to announce it in a solemn national address on the television; like JFK in the Cuban missile crisis, or Nixon saying he had never been a quitter in his resignation statement.
Restricting travel to the US from 19 countries with “hostile attitudes” or a “significant terrorist presence” is Trump effectively saying “we don’t want them here” – “them” being, with few exceptions, people from Afghanistan, Myanmar, Chad, Republic of the Congo, Equatorial Guinea, Eritrea, Haiti, Iran, Libya, Somalia, Sudan and Yemen, all of whom will be “fully” restricted.
Scarcely more welcome are the nationals of Burundi, Cuba, Laos, Sierra Leone, Togo, Turkmenistan and Venezuela, who will be partially restricted. Trump says these countries don’t vet their people as well as they should, which may well be true, but most dedicated terrorists will always find a way to deceive their own and any other government they encounter.
Just like the irrational ban on Muslim people briefly imposed in his first term in 2017, Trump chooses to demonise anyone who shares a religion or nationality with a country that’s experienced terror. This is a foolish and distressingly widespread source of Islamophobia on a global scale.
It scarcely needs pointing out that while there are a few who would seek to use and defile their own religion with violence and hatred, it does not mean all Muslims are terrorists. This demonisation of an entire group of people is nothing new, but it is dangerous – and there are many who have experienced similar prejudice: from the Irish in the 1970s, demonised for atrocities committed in their name by strangers, to innocent refugees caught up in last summer’s Southport riots, to the continuing backlash against trans people.
Not all Pakistani men or those of Pakistani heritage are grooming gang rapists. Not all Jewish people in Britain support the Israel government’s war in Gaza. It is absurd. It would be like wanting to deport all Ford Galaxy drivers because of what happened at the Liverpool parade. Yet that is exactly the train of thought in certain groups – among them, sadly, the president of the United States – whenever such a violent tragedy happens.
Too often, on social media, we find people imagining and willing an offence to have been committed by a Muslim or a refugee, in order to justify their own senseless reprisal against innocent people.
So it is now with Trump and his latest travel ban, which was prompted by the actions of one man in Colorado now being held for a firebombing attack on peaceful demonstrators showing support for Israeli hostages. The man and his family are Egyptian nationals. Egypt is not on the list of countries targeted under Trump’s order. Neither, by the way, is Saudi Arabia, nor the United Arab Emirates, nor Lebanon, whose nationals (also including an Egyptian) were responsible for the 9/11 attacks. They are still free to come and go to America.
Yet on the list of nationals marked out to be shamed by Trump are Haitians and those of Haitian descent, of whom there are more than a million living in the US. Close family members of US nationals of Haitian heritage might be able to get a visa, but (perhaps) only with a DNA test. Their friends and relatives will find it more difficult – if not impossible – to see their loved ones in America, despite, thus far, there being no evidence of any Haitian terrorist threat to the government of the United States.
There remains only the infamous fever dream of Donald Trump, which you may recall seized him during one of his election rallies last year: “In Springfield, they’re eating the dogs, the people that came in, they’re eating the cats. They’re eating the pets of the people that live there.” Baseless, obviously, but unnervingly effective. The kind of mantra that sticks, however outlandish and misleading.
Perhaps the rest of us should join the growing informal boycott of the United States – or, indeed, take a holiday in Canada instead? They have fewer guns and more sense.