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When Trump first came down the golden escalator to run for President in 2015, he began his appeal to voters by denigrating immigrants: “When Mexico sends its people, they’re not sending their best. . . . They’re sending people that have lots of problems, and they’re bringing those problems with us [sic]. They’re bringing drugs. They’re bringing crime. They’re rapists. And some, I assume, are good people.” He has been repeating some version of that imprecation for a decade now and has built a huge private militia to carry out mass arrests, incarcerations, and deportations of immigrants.
I remember thinking in 2015 that this demonizing of immigrants was not going to work in America. In fact, it strikes at the heart of America, a nation of immigrants, where people come from all over the world seeking a better life for themselves and their families. This constant renewal re-energizes America and makes it stronger. The idea that you can change your life by starting over somewhere else, and you can do it all through hard work and sheer force of will represents the best of America, not the worst.
Trump ran on the idea that he would replace this American ideal of hope and renewal with a different one, based on fear and resentment, that sees every newcomer as a threat, and immigration itself as a contagion of criminality and sloth. The reason that you’re not able to feed your family and improve your lot in life is because everything is going to these interlopers, these freeloaders taxing the public weal. Immigration doesn’t renew America, it is a terrorist invasion that saps our will and resources. We need to build a wall around America and drive out all the immigrants that are already here. To buttress this xenophobic slur, Trump knew it was necessary to convince people that immigrants were all violent, diseased criminals and terrorists.
When the “Mass Deportations Now!” signs were brought out at the end of the Republican national convention in Milwaukee in July 2024, the immediate public response was not good, and the signs were hastily withdrawn. And that public antipathy to Trump’s migrant policies has become even more negative over time, as it has become clear that the mass deportations orchestrated by Stephen Miller, Kristi Noem, and “Bag Money” Homan and ICE are needlessly cruel and destructive to families, and especially to children. We’re damaging children every day by holding them in these prison camps.
Fort Bliss, near El Paso, Texas, is the largest immigrant prison in the US. It is a military base, but the prison is operated by a private corporation called Acquisition Logistics. It currently holds 3000 people in horrific conditions, with another 2000 to come. Eighty-three years ago, Fort Bliss was used as a concentration camp to confine Japanese-Americans.
The recent assaults on immigrants have made us all complicit in this injustice, and inched us closer to adopting the morals of a man without character. Trump lied about immigrants and is using their incarceration to weaken the rule of law.
Trump himself didn’t do anything by hard work. He was given a golden ticket by his father, and he, like his father, got ahead by keeping others down. Trump has always thought that people who worked hard and were generous to others were losers and suckers, not “killers” like him. Trump squandered his inheritance and was bailed out by his parents over and over again, after multiple bankruptcies. His mentor Roy Cohn taught him how to use high-priced lawyers to manipulate the system and get away with murder. Cohn taught Trump to use the law as a cudgel against poor people and working people.
The two people that were most influential to Trump’s worldview were Roy Cohn, who was Joseph McCarthy’s chief counsel and who died of AIDS in 1986 after a life spent actively demonizing gay men, and Jeffrey Epstein, who died in prison in 2019 after being convicted as a serial child sex trafficker. Both of these men were “killers” in Trump’s sense, who fed on the misfortunes of others to enhance their own power and wealth. They taught him everything he knows. And both men called Trump their “best friend.”
The sloppy release of images and written documents by Trump’s Justice Department is making it more and more difficult to separate signal from noise in the Epstein case, and this is clearly a tactical move by the Trump administration. Two days after the congressional deadline for release of the files, Trump sent his hapless Deputy Attorney General Todd Blanche out onto the Sunday interview shows to blow out clouds of almost impenetrable obfuscation. On December 24, the DOJ posted on X that some of the documents included in its latest dump are fakes, which “serves as a reminder that just because a document is released by the Department of Justice does not make the allegations or claims within the document factual.”
The files that have been released by the DOJ show that Trump was on Epstein’s plane (the Lolita Express) many times, and his name appears more than 100 times in the files released in the first batch. They also make it clear that Trump was of interest to federal law enforcement working on the Epstein and Maxwell cases for years. Trump has repeatedly made false statements about all of these things. And his claims to know nothing about Epstein’s criminal activity are contradicted by Epstein’s own statements in emails and other documents.
Trump and his minions have set out to complete the wholesale transfer of all American assets and wealth to the 1%, while removing the meager social benefits the 99% still have. Trump is achieving a good deal of this transfer close to home through outright fraud and corruption.
At this point, at the end of the first year of Trump’s second term, 85-90% of Republicans still support Trump, but there are cracks appearing in this edifice. When the dam breaks, it will be important to make it known that we don’t want to go back to the status quo ante. When the dam breaks, we need to go forward, not back.
When Zohran Mamdani is sworn in as the mayor of New York City on January first, the poet Cornelius Eady will read a poem he wrote for the occasion. “People are seeing themselves reflected in him and in his energy,” Eady told the New York Times. “That energy allows people to keep going forward, not to despair. I’m hoping that the poem reflects that kind of moment.”
New York, city of invention
Roiling town, refresher
And re-newer,
New York, city of the real,
Where the canyons
Whisper in a hundred
Tongues,
New York,
Where your lucky self
Waits for your
Arrival,
Where there is always soil
For your root.
This is our time.
David Levi Strauss is the author of Co-illusion: Dispatches from the End of Communication (The MIT Press, 2020), Photography & Belief (David Zwirner Books, 2020), Words Not Spent Today Buy Smaller Images Tomorrow (Aperture, 2014), From Head to Hand: Art and the Manual (Oxford University Press, 2010), Between the Eyes: Essays on Photography and Politics, with an introduction by John Berger (Aperture 2003, and in a new edition, 2012), and Between Dog & Wolf: Essays on Art and Politics (Autonomedia 1999, and a new edition, 2010). In Case Something Different Happens in the Future: Joseph Beuys and 9/11 was published by Documenta 13, and To Dare Imagining: Rojava Revolution, edited by Strauss, Michael Taussig, Peter Lamborn Wilson, and Dilar Dirik, was published by Autonomedia in 2016, and in an Italian edition in 2017. The Critique of the Image Is the Defense of the Imagination, edited by Strauss, Taussig, and Wilson, was published by Autonomedia in 2020. He is Chair Emeritus of the graduate program in Art Writing at the School of Visual Arts in New York, which he directed from 2007-2021.