November 3, 2018

Donald Trump Jr. Is Basically Tweeting About White Genocide Now

Albin Lohr-Jones/Avalon via ZUMA Press

Fight disinformation: Sign up for the free Mother Jones Daily newsletter and follow the news that matters.

Sen. Angus King (I-Maine) isn’t going to lose on Tuesday, but that’s not why this comment from Donald Trump Jr., the president’s oldest son and of his most popular surrogates, is so important:

Often when conservative politicians talk about their opposition to large groups of non-white immigrants, they couch it in the rhetoric of “bad apples.” Saying you’re worried about MS-13, for instance, is a more socially acceptable argument than simply saying you don’t like Central Americans—people who should know better might even defend you when you do it. In this tweet, Trump isn’t offering misplaced fears about, I don’t know, Al-Shabaab or something. He’s not couching it in anything, there are no dots to connect; he just doesn’t want Somalis, full-stop. Having Somalis in your community is bad, on its surface, simply because they’re Somalis—that’s it, that’s the argument.

Trump’s comments have to be understood in context. Maine already has a large population of Somali-Americans, to go along with a large community of Sudanese refugees. According to the Portland Press Herald, “In 2000, Lewiston’s black population numbered a couple of hundred…Today, it is between 6,000 and 7,000, among a total of 36,000 residents, the majority of which are Somali families.” Those immigrants have had to overcome at times fierce resistance from the community they moved into. Per the Press Herald:

Soon after Somali immigrants began arriving in February 2001, the attacks of 9/11 occurred. The movie “Black Hawk Down” was playing. People feared Muslims. The community, Nadeau said, “didn’t understand who our new residents were. It was a very different time.”

Racial slurs were hurled at local Muslims, a pig’s head was tossed into a mosque, white supremacists visited Lewiston. And all of this generated national and international news coverage.

In 2002, the mayor of Lewiston wrote an open letter to the city’s Somali residents, asking them to tell Somalis in Somalia to stop coming to Lewiston. (King, as it happens, was Maine’s governor at the time, and defended the mayor, but also told Somalis very directly, “you’re welcome here.”) Trump is saying they’re not real Mainers, but even more than that, in deploying a white-nationalist concept like “repopulation,” he’s saying that after two decades, they never will be.

WE CAME UP SHORT.

We just wrapped up a shorter-than-normal, urgent-as-ever fundraising drive and we came up about $45,000 short of our $300,000 goal.

That means we're going to have upwards of $350,000, maybe more, to raise in online donations between now and June 30, when our fiscal year ends and we have to get to break-even. And even though there's zero cushion to miss the mark, we won't be all that in your face about our fundraising again until June.

So we urgently need this specific ask, what you're reading right now, to start bringing in more donations than it ever has. The reality, for these next few months and next few years, is that we have to start finding ways to grow our online supporter base in a big way—and we're optimistic we can keep making real headway by being real with you about this.

Because the bottom line: Corporations and powerful people with deep pockets will never sustain the type of journalism Mother Jones exists to do. The only investors who won’t let independent, investigative journalism down are the people who actually care about its future—you.

And we hope you might consider pitching in before moving on to whatever it is you're about to do next. We really need to see if we'll be able to raise more with this real estate on a daily basis than we have been, so we're hoping to see a promising start.

payment methods

WE CAME UP SHORT.

We just wrapped up a shorter-than-normal, urgent-as-ever fundraising drive and we came up about $45,000 short of our $300,000 goal.

That means we're going to have upwards of $350,000, maybe more, to raise in online donations between now and June 30, when our fiscal year ends and we have to get to break-even. And even though there's zero cushion to miss the mark, we won't be all that in your face about our fundraising again until June.

So we urgently need this specific ask, what you're reading right now, to start bringing in more donations than it ever has. The reality, for these next few months and next few years, is that we have to start finding ways to grow our online supporter base in a big way—and we're optimistic we can keep making real headway by being real with you about this.

Because the bottom line: Corporations and powerful people with deep pockets will never sustain the type of journalism Mother Jones exists to do. The only investors who won’t let independent, investigative journalism down are the people who actually care about its future—you.

And we hope you might consider pitching in before moving on to whatever it is you're about to do next. We really need to see if we'll be able to raise more with this real estate on a daily basis than we have been, so we're hoping to see a promising start.

payment methods

We Recommend

Latest

Sign up for our free newsletter

Subscribe to the Mother Jones Daily to have our top stories delivered directly to your inbox.

Get our award-winning magazine

Save big on a full year of investigations, ideas, and insights.

Subscribe

Support our journalism

Help Mother Jones' reporters dig deep with a tax-deductible donation.

Donate