Donald Trump’s political fame began in 2015 with his assertion that Mexican immigrants are rapists and drug dealers. Since then, he has repeatedly traded in negative stereotypes to punch up his rhetoric and to justify repressive policies—from the 2017 Muslim travel ban to his recent actions against Afghani and Somali immigrants. He frequently makes outrageous statements about entire swathes of people, based on gross generalizations and outright lies: Haitians eat cats and dogs, transgender people are mass shooters, Jews are greedy, Afghanis are terrorists, Democrats are evil, Somalis are garbage. Such claims are morally reprehensible.
They’re also inaccurate. The belief that all Somalis in Minnesota are financial scammers is no more true than the belief that all 79-year-olds with orange-tinted skin and bad comb-overs are narcissistic psychopaths. Both are false, and both endanger the kind of civic engagement our democracy relies on.
Not everyone demonizes groups of people the way Trump does. But we all generalize about people based on their identity markers, whether we’re Democrats or Republicans, wealthy or poor. Why do we do this?
