The Scapegoat Artist

The breakneck pace at which Donald Trump continues to cross lines can make it hard to remember where the old, agreed-upon lines were in the first place. We’ve become accustomed to insults, attacks, and division as part of the new American discourse. But even by that measure, what he said at yesterday’s rally in North Carolina felt different.

I’ve watched the clip many times - not because I was trying to discern some other meaning than the one that first sent chills through my body when I heard it, but because I wanted to observe the reactions on the faces of the crowd seated behind him. I encourage you to do the same. It’s telling. And as stomach-drop terrifying as Trump’s “maybe there is something the Second Amendment people can do” words were, the response from the crowd was even more alarming.

Watch the older couple seated just to his right when Trump makes that statement. The husband first registers surprise, even shock, and visibly mouths the word “wow.” He turns to his wife to gauge her reaction, and then they both laugh together. I highlight this moment not to vilify that couple. The fact that they appear so benign is what makes their response haunting.

They are a couple who likely have children and grandchildren. People who may like to spend Saturdays tending to the garden or out on the driving range. People with stories and passions and heartaches, like all of us. A couple you might feel reassured to have as your neighbors. People who would be, you are certain, more likely to bring you a loaf of fresh-baked zucchini bread than support an insurrection.

This is the real danger of Trump. It’s not in any single feud or tirade or escalating instance of rule-breaking. It’s the fear he stokes in the hearts of those who, I believe, are otherwise good and decent people. They are people with prejudices and biases to be sure, and some of those may in fact be malicious. But the unfortunate truth they reflect back to all of us is the reality of our own potentially destructive anger and fear.

People in this country, and around the world, feel unsafe. They feel insecure in their jobs, behind on their bills, and wonder how they’ll ever get ahead. It can cause us to despair of things ever really changing. Enter Trump saying he alone can fix this and promising to make America great again.

We can feel desperate when terrorist attacks are happening in places once regarded as refuges and sanctuaries. We feel demoralized when working longer hours for less pay. We worry, all the time, about the futures our children will inherit and want more than anything to guarantee their safety.

Two years ago I went to Germany and visited sites that gave witness to what happens when a nation’s disillusionment and fear are fanned into consuming, unstoppable fire. I paused for a long while at memorials built on the ashes of unfathomable atrocity - committed by fellow countrymen against people who, a few years before, were their neighbors and friends.

How could this happen, I thought? How could these German people, who I found to be welcoming and gracious during my stay there, be convinced by a madman, only 70 years prior, to make ovens for people unlike them - to incinerate with impunity those marked as the cause of all their woes?

It didn’t start with blueprints for concentration camps. It started with the same rhetoric we heard yesterday. The same rhetoric we’ve been hearing for months now, increasing in both frequency and fervor almost daily.

This is how it begins: a charismatic figure makes a vague diagnosis of an infinitely complex problem. Then he points to a single cause and proposes a solution that at first seems abhorrent, but eventually seems inevitable. It’s the age old art of finding a scapegoat to be sacrificed, to be killed, in order for the rest to prosper.

Trump first laid out the pyre wood by claiming Obama was a foreigner and an imposter. Then he classified Mexicans as drug dealers, criminals, and rapists. We must build a wall to keep them out, he said. He insisted all “illegals” meant to do us harm. Next it was Muslims, painting with a single brush stroke the world’s second largest religion. This crescendoed into a call to deport and ban all immigrants or travelers from countries deemed by him as suspect and undesirable. Yesterday it was his only viable political opponent in his ascent to the presidency.

Who will it be tomorrow?