Now Donald Trump turns to alligators to terrorise migrants

The Herald Scotland

a day ago

'[If] people get out, there's not much waiting for them other than alligators and pythons. Nowhere to go, nowhere to hide,' said Uthmeier, probably hoping to slither his way to Donald Trump's notice.
Trump did notice: earlier this week he jeered that people would have to 'know how to run away from an alligator' to escape it.
The Dade-Collier Airstrip isn't so very far from Palm Beach and Mar a Lago, home to Trump and the wealthy elites. Welcome to Florida's version of the Hunger Games.
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The demise of empathy on one side of US politics is stark and shocking. Undocumented migrants who have lived and worked in the United States for decades – childcare providers, waiting staff, tradespeople, small business owners – supporting the voracious US economy and paying taxes, are going into hiding in fear of deportation raids; in fear of places like Alligator Alcatraz.
People who have committed no crime don't go into hiding from the government in healthy democracies. Last month, Donald Trump enacted the next part of the authoritarian playbook by ordering the National Guard into California to crush street demonstrations against his deportations. It was hardly a surprise: he has spoken of dissenters as 'the enemy from within'.
Trump's callousness appears to be exactly what a lot of voters love about him. His wall on the southern border, and a much tougher stance against migrants, were key 2016 election pledges. The wall was an expensive failure but potent as a symbol of hostility towards the 'other'.
That first presidency resulted in thousands of children of migrants being separated from their families and caged, sometimes with inadequate food, cleaning facilities or care, an image of American disgrace. Children cared for lone toddlers. After a torrent of criticism, the policy was supposedly ended, but last year, six years on, Human Rights Watch reported that more than 1,300 children had still to be reunited with their families.
The word 'cruel' isn't working hard here. This is the dictionary definition.
It is not just a MAGA phenomenon. There are no borders around ideas and we have seen cruel behaviour playing out here in the UK too.
Riot police hold back protesters after disorder broke out on July 30, 2024 in Southport, England (Image: Chris Furlong) Last summer's riots in several English towns, and the vicious attacks on hotels housing asylum seekers, should rid us of any complacency on that score. Last month, an outbreak of violent rioting in Northern Ireland resulted in racially-motivated attacks. A man, woman and their four young children had to escape after their home was targeted in a fire attack.
Often unrest is whipped up, sometimes by politicians, sometimes by social media. Social media has provided platform, validation and community for the hate-mongerers. Feel furious about women? Transgender people? Ethnic minorities? There's a place for you in cyberspace.
There have always been instances of callous politics here in the UK – remember Theresa May's 'Go Home' vans in 2013 – but the shameless divisiveness really took hold under Boris Johnson. His political rise was fuelled by it and he seemed often to glory in it.
It was Boris Johnson who appointed Priti Patel as Home Secretary, the originator of a scheme to turn precarious, overcrowded migrant boats back in the middle of the English Channel, putting lives in very real danger (it was never enacted after Patel seemed finally to accept it was plain illegal).
Migrant boats accounted for a tiny proportion of immigrants (three per cent), with ever-rising net migration numbers down to the issuing of visas by the Conservatives themselves, but it was a classic example of scapegoating by a government that was failing on most metrics.
The worry is that the more politicians promote inhumane policies, the less shocked we are by them and the more they are tempted to ramp them up further.
Suella Braverman shamelessly cranked up the hysteria around those migrant boats, describing them as an 'invasion' and suggesting the answer was to deport all migrants to Rwanda – at enormous expense – a country that the UK's own parliament had declared unsafe. Labour thankfully put paid to that.
None of this, by the way, is to suggest that having concerns about immigration is in any way inhumane.
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The issue is the demonisation of migrants themselves and the promotion of ruthless policy responses. Addressing immigration levels is something politicians must do; characterising migrants and immigrants as the root cause of the deep, broad and thorny social and economic problems facing countries like the US and UK is grotesquely dishonest.
We can debate where this is all coming from, but the worrying question is where is it taking us? Down a dangerous path – that much is clear. Cruelty begets cruelty.
All this is taking place against a backdrop of a self-confidence crisis among moderate political figures, particularly in the US. They must find their voice, extending empathy to those, like some disillusioned white men, who feel blamed for society's ills and frozen out of the compassion matrix, but at the same time standing absolutely firm against a narrative in which small groups are blamed and demonised.
'Don't run in a straight line, run like this...' Trump said to reporters, zig-zagging his hand, demonstrating how to escape alligators. 'And, you know what? Your chances go up about one per cent.'
Mirthless jokes about vulnerable othered minorities trying to escape man-eating animals. This is what happens when empathy dies.
Rebecca McQuillan is a journalist specialising in politics and Scottish affairs. She can be found on Bluesky at @becmcq.bsky.social and on X at @BecMcQ