Demagogue /n./ ˈdem’ə gäg’ : a leader who makes use of popular prejudices and false claims and promises in order to gain power.

“Blessed are the ‘shithole countries,’ for they gave us the American Dream.” – Paul Hewson

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In the past month, much of the political discourse in the U.S. revolved around fearmongering by Donald Trump and his vice-presidential candidate J.D. Vance against immigrants, specifically Haitian immigrants in Ohio. After Trump repeated baseless rumors about Haitians stealing (and eating) people’s cats and dogs in Springfield, that town was subjected to at least 33 bomb threats, including schools, government buildings, and local colleges, according to Ohio Governor Mike DeWine (a Republican, if that matters to you).

While the bomb threats turned out to be empty, they were nonetheless highly disruptive, with hospitals put on lockdown, City Hall and schools evacuated, and universities forced to hold classes remotely. DeWine revealed that there was evidence that some of the threats originated overseas, likely in an attempt to create a bit of chaos in the U.S. Yet, other threats were local and not so empty. Haitians in Springfield have had property  vandalized and reported feeling anxious and afraid for their lives. Haitian-American media outlets have also been threatened. And even a white business owner in Springfield (a Republican who voted twice for Trump) has had his life and those of his family threatened after he defended his Haitian employees. The fallout for ordinary people has been very real, stemming largely from Trump’s and Vance’s incitement.

DeWine also told a reporter that he was “infuriated’ at how Trump and Vance repeatedly demonized Haitians in Ohio with false claims about them being “illegal immigrants,” spreaders of disease, and of course people who steal and eat pets. Their comments, DeWine said, “are just hurtful, they’re hurtful to a lot of people, and people listen and they hear that (Trump’s) kicking everybody out, anybody who’s not born here.”

If elected, Trump claimed he would enact “the largest deportation in the history of our country, start(ing) with Springfield and Aurora, [Colorado].” The mention of Aurora did not receive as much media attention as Springfield did. Its inclusion stemmed from fearmongering against another migrant group in that city: Venezuelans and the real existence, albeit exaggerated, of Venezuelan gang members.

Most people would agree that gang activity and pet stealing would be unwanted things, if they existed. But aside from the obvious xenophobia, there are other unspoken things going on with Trump’s and Vance’s claims: namely collective punishment and essentialism.

By threatening “the largest deportation in the history of our country,” Trump demonized entire groups whole cloth, not just alleged gang members or fictional dog eaters. The heart of the matter is that—ever since he became a candidate in 2015—a key part of Trump’s strategy has been to try to focus people’s ire on certain immigrant groups, almost invariably nonwhite, by painting them as unwanted threats (as a recent example, he has hyped criminals from “the Congo”). The concept he has weaponized is that the “wrong” people have come here, and there is something in their essence that is dangerous, substandard in intellect or character or criminality (an ironic accusation coming from someone convicted of multiple felonies), or unable to assimilate. He has overtly stated that these outgroups are “poisoning the blood of our country,” “destroying the fabric of our country,” and will transform every American town into a “third-world hellhole.” And according to Trump, they might even “walk into your kitchen and cut your throat.” The not so subtle subtext is that they don’t belong here, that they should be banned or removed in their entirety, and that Americans should be afraid and very angry at their being here, possibly to the point of violence. In short, this is textbook demagoguery.

Flashback to 2016

None of this is new for Trump. There is one more example, forgotten by most people, but one that made a deep impression on me eight years ago. In April 2016, when Trump was still a candidate, he made his only campaign stop to my birth state of Rhode Island. His comments that day are illuminating in hindsight, revealing a recurrent fixation on playing to people’s prejudices and dishonestly whipping up fear. I wrote about this in more detail before, so I will summarize.

In a nutshell, what Trump said that day was that Rhode Islanders needed to be afraid of newly arriving Syrian refugees resettling in the state. In true demagogic fashion, he told the crowd multiple falsehoods that would likely frighten and anger them: (1) that he favored legal immigration (but immediately contradicted himself by bashing refugees who are, by definition, legal), (2) that there were a lot of Syrian refugees in the state (there were only 26 at the time, mostly young families), (3) that nothing was known about them (in reality, refugees undergo multiple layers of screening), and (4) suggested they could be ISIS. He also juxtaposed Syrian refugees with the San Bernadino mass shooting, which was committed by a U.S. born man of Pakistani descent and his Pakistani-born wife, neither of whom were refugees nor Syrians.

The obvious implication he was making was that all people from predominantly Muslim countries are potential threats, even though the U.S. has several hundred mass shootings per year, the overwhelming majority committed by people who aren’t Muslims. UNC sociologist Charles Kurzman concluded that between 9/11 and 2023, the total number of fatalities in the U.S. attributed to violent Muslim extremists was 141. In that same time frame, there were 309,000+ homicides in the U.S. The violent death of innocent people is always a tragedy, no matter the motives or background of the perpetrator. However, painting Muslims as being intrinsically prone to violence is pernicious, as well as statistically false. Ultimately, Trump told the Rhode Island crowd to “lock your doors, folks.”

And to some extent the fearmongering worked.

Some of my fellow Rhode Islanders loudly jeered at the idea of having Syrian refugees living nearby. There was a national uptick in anti-Muslim hate crimes in 2016, though luckily, there doesn’t seem to be any detectable pattern in tiny Rhode Island. However, as a general rule, if you want to make people angry, one of the best ways is to push their moral buttons and convince them that an injustice exists somewhere that is an affront to their safety, property, or values. This is true, even if the premise is fabricated. If you push enough buttons, say by spreading an outrageous rumor in a nationally televised debate or on your prominent social media account, you can anger a lot of people simultaneously. Some of those people will contemplate threats and violence as an appropriate response. A smaller subset may actually follow through (although—to our credit—most of us do not). It’s just probability, like a perverse form of the Drake Equation.

The last thing is essentialism. Arguing that entire ethnic groups are in their essence problematic and need to be removed is a throwback to a racist mentality of yesteryear (or yestercentury). As the descendant of Irish immigrants, I think back to how far we have come from a time when it was argued that my own ancestors were seen as intrinsically, inescapably filthy and ignorant. An 1880 editorial in the New York Times, with all of its influence, made this argument:

“Most of the individuals who make up this mass are links and are descending chain of evolution. In Ireland or Italy, or whatever may be the land of their origin, their ancestry for generations back have dwelt in squalid huts or noisome cellars, subjected year in and year out to the degenerating influences of an environment of wretchedness. The higher qualities of manly strength and vigor fade out of body and mind under such enervating conditions, and after repeated transmission from father to son, the accumulated result appears in a visible degradation of type. This story of retrogression is the genealogy of thousands of immigrants who have settled among us. It is absurd to expect hearty cooperation and sanitary observances from a man whose whole life and lineage are steeped in filth and ignorance.” New York Times (Sunday July 11, 1880)

This really isn’t all that different from the Trumpian stance, which is that people from “shithole countries” are unwanted because, by extension, they are essentially ‘shitty’ themselves. In this way of thinking the moral, economic, and social “worth” of people is at least partly some consequence of some nebulous “essence” (whether cultural or biological), rather than the result of different potential circumstances in which we grow and learn. Had the views of the 1880 NY Times editorialist prevailed, Irish and Italian Americans (among others) would have had no seat at the table. If you’re an American, there’s a good chance your own ancestors would have been excluded as well, leaving them and all their descendants unable to follow the idealism of the American dream. It seems to me that is something we should not allow to take root again.