Can We Now Call Our Opponents Subhuman?

In a season of political insults, is designating your adversaries as 'animals' going too far?

Already in this early stage of a ferocious and sure-to-be closely contested presidential campaign, the insults from both sides have come gushing forth with the unstoppable force and heat of volcanic lava eruptions.

Former President Trump has repeatedly called his opponent and others in the Biden bunch “Communists”, “Marxists,” “Fascists”, “Traitors”, “America Haters,” “Crooked,” “Stupid,” “Vermin”, “Corrupt” and, in an oddly old-fashioned touch, “Villains.”

The incumbent meanwhile, while describing his “predecessor” and avoiding Trump’s name altogether, paints his rival as a wannabe dictator, leading a quasi-religious cult of blinded fanatics who are determined to stop at nothing in their demonic drive to destroy democracy.

No one can claim that this race between two profoundly grumpy old men will qualify as one of the more enlightening and uplifting in our history, but it may classify as the most vitriolic, nasty and profoundly negative.

Yet even in this context, the implication that the guys on the other side qualify as less than human may have crossed some meaningful line and should arouse disgust from even the most frenzied and impassioned partisans.

In Dayton, Ohio, during his first rally since locking in the delegates he needs for the GOP nomination, Donald Trump rambled for nearly 90 minutes and, in addition to angry complaints about a defective teleprompter, classified unwanted migrants as distinctly subhuman.

After claiming that other countries were sending their imprisoned and insane “young people” across the border, he added: “I don’t know if you can call them ‘people’, in some cases. They’re not people in my opinion.” Later in his discourse, he described them explicitly as “animals.”

The next day, he appeared in a Fox News interview with Howard Kurtz, who asked him why he continued to use terms like “vermin” and “poisoning of the blood” when describing migrants, knowing that Hitler and Mussolini had used similar language.

“Because our country is being poisoned,” Trump insisted. “We can be nice about it, we can talk about, ‘Oh, I want to be politically correct. But we have people coming in from prisons and jails, long-term murderers…”

In reporting these comments, the New York Times felt compelled to note that “according to border officials, including some who worked in the trump administration, most migrants who cross the border are members of vulnerable families fleeing violence and poverty, and available data do not support the idea that migrants are spurring increases in crime.”

Regardless of legitimate disagreements on immigration policy, it’s hard to imagine that President Trump’s supporters—especially the substantial number of Christian believers among them—would feel entirely comfortable in dismissing destitute asylum seekers as less than human. Denying them citizenship, or legal residency, is one thing, but denying them recognition as “people” is something else. Do Americans really mean to deny the Biblical title of “children of God” to those who lack the proper paperwork from our dysfunctional immigration system?

The debate will continue on how to repair that system and bring meaningful security to the southern border after Biden’s mishandling of the current crisis. But when the Republican candidate for president of the United States slanders unauthorized migrants for “poisoning our blood”, or characterizes them as sub-humans who need to be “rooted out like vermin,” he undermines both his own campaign and the chance for constructive conversation about needed reforms.