Think America is in for a disastrous four years if Donald Trump is elected president?
You’re being optimistic. Given what some of American children are learning from him, it may take an entire generation to recover from the hateful rhetoric he’s aimed at immigrants, Muslims and Blacks Lives Matter protesters.
Trump’s vitriol is making it off the campaign trail and into the lingua franca of children at an alarming rate. Just watch coverage from Trump rallies to hear the next phrases children will be slinging at school. “Build the wall!” was the chant at a high school basketball game in Indiana last week, directed by children from a majority-white school who held up Trump signs and yelled at the opposing players and fans, who are from a predominantly Latino school.
“Get ‘em out!” is what Trump screams at every rally when he sees Black Lives Matter and other protesters, even silent ones. This is not far off from what some third-graders allegedly said to two of the brown-skin classmates in their Northern Virginia classroom. The mother of one of the children posted an account on Facebook: “I just got a call from my son’s teacher giving me a heads up that two of his classmates decided to point out the ‘immigrants’ in the class who would be sent ‘home’ when Trump becomes president. They singled him out and were pointing and laughing at him as one who would have to leave because of the colour of his skin. In third grade ... in Fairfax County ... in 2016!”
The mum, whose name has become a hashtag on Twitter, even though she removed the post from her Facebook page, called it the “Trump Effect”.
“We’ll be banned,” predicted Daisy scouts when they talked to me before the Virginia primary about their futures. Not “I want to be a rocket scientist” or “I want to be a doctor” or “I want to be a teacher.” They are afraid they will all be rounded up and deported. They are all Muslim.
The televised Trump rallies are becoming like Lord of the Flies set pieces. Nightly, televised Hunger Games. With each new video, we have a new group of angry white people pointing, yelling and chanting at brown-skinned people being escorted out of a crowd, with the booming Trump refrain of “Get ‘em out”. It’s like all of those horrible school integration photos of screaming crowds surrounding black students in the 1960s are being reenacted.
Even if children are not taking their phrases directly from Trump’s playbook, his guided free-for-all has unleashed a growing atmosphere of hate. I don’t know whether Trump was the inspiration for the children on an all-white Annapolis-area hockey team who singled out the black players on my son’s team, calling them the N-word and harassing them throughout the game. But they heard those words somewhere. After all, coded racism has now been rebranded as “telling it like it is” — thanks to Trump and the people who think he will be the strong, decisive character they’ve watched on reality TV if they elect him. He won’t renounce white supremacists who support him, he won’t acknowledge that the Ku Klux Klan is a hate group and, in an eerie display of flashback scenes, he recently asked his followers at a rally to raise their right hands, Nuremberg-style, and pledge their loyalty and votes to him.
In New Orleans last week, Trump was frustrated that guards didn’t remove the black protesters who were peacefully standing among the crowd at his rally quickly enough. “It’s taking a long time, I can’t believe it,” he said. “See in the old days it wouldn’t take so long. We’re living in a different world.”
We were living in a different world. And this new world we’re in seems frighteningly and dangerously like the old one we were finally making progress leaving behind.
— Washington Post
Petula Dvorak is a Washington Post columnist.
