By Samuel Damren
At a rally on December 16, Donald Trump stated that “immigrants” are “poisoning the blood of America.” When advised through media, internet, and others that the language was straight out of Hitler’s “Mein Kampf,” he doubled down, claiming that the context was different and also asserting that he never read “Mein Kampf.”
What the difference in context is and how he would know it if he never read the book, Trump did not explain.
It is all on video.
This commentary offers a different perspective on the “blood” of America. It was memorably presented to me by my father at the dinner table one evening when I was 12. Here is the context.
My parents first met on a troopship taking them and several thousand American soldiers from across the country to England in World War II. They were both members of the American Red Cross. Mother was 24. Father was 36. Like millions of others in different services and capacities, they volunteered to serve after the attack on Pearl Harbor.
Mother grew up on a farm near Adrian which the family lost at the onset of the Great Depression. The family continued to work the farm paying rent to the man who bought it out of foreclosure. In 1942, she was a school teacher in Lake Orion.
Father was born in Maine. During the 1930s, he worked for the Reconstruction Finance Corporation in Washington, D.C. As a result of traveling the country to evaluate local businesses seeking government loans, he interacted with Americans from all backgrounds.
The troopship that they met on was not just any troopship. It was the former Cunard luxury liner Queen Mary that had been painted grey, armed with deck guns and re-purposed with heavy metal plating. The voyage was perilous as German submarines then ruled the Atlantic.
In England, my future parents were exposed to another great spectrum of Americans as well as British, Scots, and innumerable Europeans displaced by the war.
My parents returned to the States some months after D-Day. They married a couple of years later, living first in Chicago and then moving to Ann Arbor. Post- war, the population of Ann Arbor increased by 60 percent, including a substantial number of immigrants from all corners of the world. I was born in 1950.
Flash forward to a typical family dinner in 1962. Via a letter received that day, Dad learned that his mother’s family was descended from someone who arrived on the Mayflower in 1620. Relatives back in Maine thought this was a big deal, but neither of my parents did, so it was the topic of conversation that evening.
I did not know what to think about whether being a descendant of someone on the Mayflower was significant. Mother’s relatives did not arrive on the Mayflower. The paternal side of my father’s family did not arrive on the Mayflower.
I do not remember the back and forth, but I remember how the conversation ended. Dinner was over and just before we got up, father looked at mother and then at me. “Well, here’s what I think. Sam, you are an American mutt. So am I and so is Mom. It’s a fine breed.” We all laughed.
I’ve told the story to friends from time to time because it is funny. It does not seem so funny today.
My parents would be both shocked and angered, as many are, that Nazi racist beliefs are being bandied about by a candidate for President of the United States as if – with proper context – the “blood” of one group could somehow make them superior to another.
Given his recent comments on immigrants poisoning American blood, the question of whether Donald Trump is a devout and doubled down racist is now beyond debate.
Some of his supporters might have questioned it the first time they voted for him and maybe even the second. However, any pretense to disguise his true beliefs is no longer credible.
My Dad’s humorous sentiments regarding the “fine breed” of “American mutts” resonate with Ronald Reagan’s far more eloquent observations on the contribution of immigrants to America made at the close of his presidency. You can – and should – view them on You Tube video: President Reagan’s Remarks on IMMIGRANTS – January 19, 1989.
The contrast between Reagan’s grace and Trump’s mouthing of Nazi slogans is a measure of how far the Republican Party has fallen.
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Samuel Damren is a retired Detroit lawyer and author of “What Justice Looks Like.”
