Duality has been a central theme of Trump's campaign and administration and that should not be a surprising fact. Racism depends on the balance and execution of power throughout society and he and his cronies can create actual policies based on their racist beliefs. For cis white men to be on top, queer people of color must be at the bottom of the pyramid and he ensures this as well as he can in the best ways he can. He uses legislation to create rewards for the wealthy and obstacles for the poor while also manufacturing a crisis and destroying our democracy. While multibillion-dollar companies enjoy tax cuts, people are being locked up for seeking asylum and even being citizens, among other things.
Language's power stems from its ability to not directly attack but to also prime the listeners for larger attacks. Words are forgettable at their first utterance. Someone tossing out a word like "pest" once or twice is odd—uncomfortable even—but of no real significance. Saying it once will draw attention for one news cycle until eventually everyone moves on and no one returns their attention back onto it again. Using similar words over a long period of time is closer to what farmers do. Comments disparaging other countries with other people now is a seed planted that will eventually grow into a comment attacking areas of our country and our people framed to be other people.
This past week, Donald Trump called Baltimore "a disgusting, rat and rodent-infested mess" and there are several reasons that this is a problem beyond the obvious. I don't want to get into the specifics of why it's a racially motivated attack (you'll notice that he has a habit of reserving language commonly used for vermin to refer to people of color), I want to talk about the broader image. America has always been a country of "infestations." It was "infested" by European colonizers until they slaughtered enough Native Americans to flip the script and call them the infestation. It wasn't "infested" when European colonizers brought Africans over as slaves, but the moment these Africans, now Americans were freed, they were suddenly an "infestation." Hawaii was "infested" by natives until it was captured by American colonizers to produce that precious pineapple.
The word "infest" or "infested" in this context doesn't mean anything more than "not ours" and that's an incredibly important distinction. Every aspect of American culture was "infested" by one group or another because American culture was created by taking a bit from this culture and a bit from that culture and combining them together. The office of president has (in my, admittedly idealist view) never been one in which the occupant is above everyone else if anything they are below. The president is closer to an attending physician. Our ails are the president's responsibility to make better; if you have an infection, you take an antibiotic, not ICE.
