THURSDAY, March 28, 2024
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Trump decides which murders matter

Trump decides which murders matter

It should come as no surprise that prejudice born of false beliefs gunned down an engineer from India working in the US

The murder of an Indian immigrant in the US state of Kansas on February 22 – in what appears to have been a hate crime – caused shock around the world. Members of minorities within the United States have been understandably worried about this and other similar recent incidents. The Donald Trump White House, however – determined on keeping such incidents in neat pigeonholes lest public sentiment interfere with its anti-immigration intentions – is insisting that the man accused of killing of Srinivas Kuchibhotla was a lone nut and nothing more.
It is reported that military veteran Adam Purinton first asked Kuchibhotla and his co-worker and compatriot Alok Madasani whether they were residing in the US illegally. The two engineers from India held entirely legal work visas. Purinton allegedly shouted, “Get out of my country!” before firing his gun at both men, wounding Madasani as well as a Caucasian bystander who tried to intervene. Investigators’ initial findings suggest this was a case of xenophobic racism. 
Reporters at the White House asked whether hate crime has been on the rise since Trump became president. Press secretary Sean Spicer called the notion “absurd”. At Trump’s own press conference two weeks ago, a reporter from a weekly newspaper serving the Orthodox Jewish community asked him about a documented recent rise in anti-Semitism across the US. Trump shouted him down and ridiculed him as a representative of the “lying press”.
Hillary Clinton, emerging from a long silence since losing the presidency to Trump, urged him to make a public statement about the murder in Kansas. But not even on Twitter, Trump’s favourite platform for commenting on all kinds of news stories, has he found time to note that terrible incident. He ought to. It seems clear that tensions are rising within the US along racial and ethnic lines, and that his pushback against immigration has much to do with it.
The Trump administration’s first thrust in that direction – barring travellers from seven mainly Muslim countries – was abruptly halted in court. But the stream of bigotry and unfounded fear that carried Trump to victory shows signs of surging, further damaging American society and US prestige overseas, and likely costing more lives. 
No, Trump cannot be singled out for the blame. He came out on top of a nasty drawn-out election campaign in which every Republican candidate advocated measures to curtail immigration and deal with illegal aliens, and yet none succeeded in countering Trump’s ridiculous claim of an alien threat to national security. Perhaps the other contenders failed to challenge him on constitutional grounds because no one believed he could win the party’s nomination. If so, they misjudged the electorate’s sentiments just as much as the pollsters.
A week on from the wholly unnecessary murder of Srinivas Kuchibhotla, the government has offered not a word of condolence to his widow or the wounded Madasani, nor commendation for the brave bystander, Ian Grillot, surely a hero by anyone’s standards. It’s not like Trump avoids commenting on incidents of localised violence. He’s since tweeted about the killing of six people in Chicago, presumably since that case suits his pitch better, involving “inner city crime” among people of colour. As long as he keeps his support base worried about such things, they’ll want a tough guy in the White House and let him run roughshod over the constitution to “protect” them.
Unfortunately, the crises that Trump’s supporters fret about have been largely invented for their consumption by politicians who know which buttons to push to awaken deep-rooted prejudices. There is no immigrant threat to American safety or jobs or dollars, and yet a man with a gun in Kansas believed there was.

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