To Chamber of Commerce Trumpers – Watch What You Wish For

Ralph Nader

 October 31, 2024
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Image by Annie Spratt.

Open Letter to President and CEO Suzanne P. Clark of the U.S. Chamber of Commerce:

Dear President Clark,

The Chamber has come a long way without my advice. However, perhaps, you will indulge my curiosity over the majority of your members supporting Donald Trump for President.

There are few conditions that the business community craves more than stability and predictability. Donald Trump is a daily chaos machine. He survives and thrives on turmoil. It is integral to his egocentric personality and supercilious character traits. It is also terribly distracting for those who focus on the business of business. It produces unproductive divisions and uproars which are bad for society and the economy. It is no secret that Mr. Trump will pursue policies of revenge against his political opponents, judges, law enforcers, and others who dared to openly defy him. Recall his July 2019 declaration, “I have an Article II, where I have the right to do whatever I want as President.” That has been his modus vivendi.

Whole classes of people, critical to the functioning of the economy, are on his retribution hit list. If elected, Trump, a convicted felon and the subject of multiple indictments will target immigrants, academic specialists, student activists, and a wide swath of Americans he stereotypes as “leftists, Marxists and lunatics.” People who happen to not like Trump, his outlawry, fact deprivations, prevarications, bigotry, misogyny, and his contempt for those he calls “suckers and losers,” including people with disabilities, are all at risk. Even retired generals, usually reluctant to enter the political fray, are now speaking out in no uncertain terms against Trump’s candidacy.

Consider some specific policy positions he has stridently advanced. Trump thinks higher tariffs across the board, are paid by the foreign exporter and not passed on to consumers as higher prices. Do you know any business economists who have accepted this bizarre notion? Apart from this inflationary impact, a tariff war is believed to invite certain retaliation by foreign countries.

Trump, regularly, rejects grave realities, past and present, replacing them with serious delusions. He cannot process information and brags about not reading.

Trump incites violence and brings out the worst kind of hatefulness against large groups of Americans whom he paints as “enemies within.” Many of these people merely disagree with Trump. He seriously degrades reasonable trust in the electoral process by characterizing elections he loses as being “rigged.” Moreover, where pro-Trump governors and legislators are in office, varieties of unprecedented voter suppression and purges are rampant. Your late predecessor, Thomas J. Donohue rejected such “conduct” as eroding “our democratic institutions.”

The Chamber may like his additional tax-cutting promises until, your economists tally up the deficits. The federal debt now takes more interest dollars to service than the Pentagon’s budget. The ever-increasing, unaudited military budget, it is never enough for Trump and causes a serious diversion from public budgets for job-producing investments in infrastructure repair and upgrading so essential for a modern corporate economy.

Trump also wants to compromise the touted independence of the Federal Reserve. It is part of his web of presidential control and he is, as you know, a control freak. What is different from his first term is that, if elected, he would bring in a larger number of political appointees with extreme ideological biases and utter contempt for the civil service. Does the Chamber wish to return to the 19th century “spoils system” and the corrosive corruption that it fostered? Corruption often involves overreaching business crooks who give your community a bad name and incessant negative headlines.

Imagine the labor disruptions that would be caused by Trump’s determination to generate the largest deportations in American history. Over and over again he calls immigrants criminals, drug traffickers and invokes a variety of equally vile and unfounded sweeping stereotypes. His base will insist on his follow-through. This will also provoke serious ethnic tensions with costly collateral damage to critical sectors of the economy.

The oil, gas, and coal companies comprise a key bloc of your membership. They applaud Trump calling climate violence a “hoax and his “drill baby drill” mantra. Unfortunately, mega-hurricanes, mega-floods, and mega-wildfires will have the final verdict on Trump’s destructive scrapping of a swifter transition to renewable and conservation efficiencies.

You may like his constant reference to “deregulation” or as he has recently called for “no regulation.” Aside from studies showing the benefits of regulatory standards (see what weak regulation has done to Boeing since 2020) and protection of health and safety, what do you really have to fear from the best corporate Democrats money can buy? Besides you have a corporate judiciary bolstered by powerful corporate law firms, right up to the U.S. Supreme Court.

The Chamber’s members are predominantly Republican from years of allegiance to the GOP. Trump, the Republican nominee has repeatedly refused to accede to a peaceful transfer of power should he lose in November. You may wish to urgently advise your members to “Be careful what they wish for.”

Ralph Nader is a consumer advocate, lawyer and author of Only the Super-Rich Can Save Us! 

How Trump’s Racist Talk of Immigrant ‘Bad

Genes’ Echoes Some of the Last Century’s

Darkest Ideas About Eugenics

Shannon Bow O'Brien 

 October 31, 2024

THE CONVERSATION

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Drawing by Nathaniel St. Clair

Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump has repeatedly denounced immigrants who enter the U.S. illegally and the danger he says that poor immigrants of color pose for the U.S. – often using hateful language to make his point.

In early October 2024, Trump took his comments a step further when he questioned immigrants’ faulty genes, saying without support that “Many of them murdered far more than one person, and they are now happily living in the United States. You know, now a murderer, I believe this, it’s in their genes. And we got a lot of bad genes in our country right now.”

It was far from the first time Trump has invoked eugenics – a false, racist theory that some people, and even some races, are genetically superior to others.

In 1988, for example, Trump told Oprah Winfrey during an interview: “You have to be born lucky in the sense that you have to have the right genes.”

In 2016, Trump said that his German roots are the reason behind his greatness:

“I always said that winning is somewhat, maybe, innate. Maybe it’s just something you have; you have the winning gene. Frankly it would be wonderful if you could develop it, but I’m not so sure you can. You know, I’m proud to have that German blood, there’s no question about it. Great stuff.”

And in 2020, Trump again alluded to his belief that bloodlines convey excellence:

“I had an uncle who went to MIT who is a top professor. Dr. John Trump. A genius. It’s in my blood. I’m smart.”

Trump’s repeated and countless comments about white people’s racial superiority to people of color have prompted some comparisons to the Nazis and their ideology of racial superiority.

The Nazis are indeed the most infamous believers of the false idea that white, blue-eyed, blonde-haired people were superior to others – and that the human population should be selectively managed to breed white people.

But the Nazis didn’t originate these ideas. In fact, the Nazis were so impressed with many American eugenic ideas that they incorporated them into their racist, antisemitic laws.

Root of eugenics

The British scientist Francis Galton, a cousin of the evolutionist Charles Darwin, first developed the theory of eugenics in the 1860s, and it gained a foothold in the U.S. and Britain around this time.

Eugenics sets racial identity, and especially white identity, as the most desirable and worthy.

By the dawn of the early 1900s, much of the American eugenics scholarship looked down on American immigrants from any place other than Scandinavia, thus coining the term “Nordicism.”

In the late 19th and early 20th century, immigration to the U.S. was at its peak. In 1890, 14.8% of people living in the U.S. were immigrants. Many people felt concerned about immigration in the U.S., and there were many prominent eugenicists in America. Two of the most famous were Madison Grant and Lothrop Stoddard.

Both were avowed white supremacists who advocated for scientific racism. They wrote popular and widely read books that helped shape American and German law in the 1920s and 1930s.

Grant, Stoddard and other theorists in the U.S. embraced eugenics as a way to justify racial segregation, restrict immigration, enforce sterilization and uphold other systemic inequalities.

Stoddard attacked the United States’ immigration policies in his 1920 book, “The Rising Tide of Color: The Threat Against White World-Supremacy.” He wrote: “If the present drift is not changed, we whites are all ultimately doomed. … We now know that men are not, and never will be equal. We now know that environment and education can only develop what heredity brings.”

Another prominent eugenicist was Harry H. Laughlin, an educator and superintendent of the Eugenics Record Office, a now-defunct research group that gathered biological and social information about the American population.

Laughlin wrote an influential 1922 book, “Eugenical Sterilization in the United States,” which included a chapter on model sterilization laws. The Third Reich used his book and laws as a template when implementing them in Germany during the height of the Nazi period.

Laughlin also regularly testified before U.S. Congress, with this 1922 testimony representative of his message to lawmakers: “Immigration is essentially and fundamentally a racial and biological problem. There are many factors to consider, but, from the standpoint of the future, immigration is primarily a long time national investment in human family stocks.”

Eugenicists, including Laughlin, have long been specifically preoccupied with Norwegian genetics – believing that America is under attack when immigration occurs from non-Nordic countries.

In November 1922, Laughlin said, “Some of our finest and most desirable immigrants are from Norway.”

In 1924, Congress approved the Immigration Act, which severely limited immigration to the U.S., established quotas for immigrants based on nationality and barred immigrants from Asia.

It was only following the end of World War II and the Holocaust that eugenics fell out of favor and lost its prominence in American thinking.

Trump’s recycling of history

Fears over foreign immigrants weakening the U.S. were popular a century ago, and Trump and many of his followers still embrace them today.

Trump has promised that he will carry out mass deportations of immigrants living in the U.S. illegally, forcibly detaining immigrants in camps and removing 1 million people a year.

In April 2024, Trump used dehumanizing language to express his apparent belief that immigrants are unworthy of empathy. “The Democrats say, ‘Please don’t call them animals. They’re humans.’ I said, ‘No, they’re not humans, they’re not humans, they’re animals.’”

Trump has also promoted eugenicists’ obsession with Scandinavia and the superiority of white people.

In 2018, Trump spoke about immigrants from Haiti, El Salvador and Africa, saying “Why are we having all these people from shithole countries come here?”

In the same meeting, Trump also reportedly suggested that the U.S. should instead draw in more people from countries like Norway.

In April 2024, Trump again embraced this idea of Scandinavian superiority, saying that he wants immigrants from “Nice countries. You know, like Denmark, Switzerland? Do we have any people coming in from Denmark? How about Switzerland? How about Norway?”

A dangerous flash to the past

A person running for president in 1924 would seem more likely than a candidate in 2024 to espouse this now-discredited point of view.

President Calvin Coolidge ran for election on an “America First” platform in 1924, with the slogan only falling out of favor after groups like the Ku Klux Klan embraced it around the same time.

The idea of America First, at the time, denoted American nationalism and exceptionalism – but also was linked to anti-immigration and fascist movements.

When Coolidge signed the heavily restrictive 1924 Immigration Act into law he stated, “America must remain American.”

One hundred years later, Trump calls to mind an America First mentality, including when he regularly reads the lyrics to a song called “The Snake” during his rallies as a way to explain the dangers of welcoming immigrants into the U.S. The civil rights activist Oscar Brown wrote this poem in 1963, and his family has said that Trump misinterprets the song’s words.

‘I saved you,’ cried that woman.

‘And you’ve bit me even, why’

‘You know your bite is poisonous and now I’m going to die.’

‘Oh shut up, silly woman,’ said the reptile with a grin,

‘You knew damn well I was a snake before you took me in.’

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.