Let me tell you about the poisoning of America

He’s at it again.  Yesterday, as I was flying home from my son Lucian’s graduation and commissioning as an army officer, Donald Trump was in New Hampshire stirring up the crowd at one of his rallies by talking about – what else – the evils of those terrible immigrants.  “They’re poisoning the blood of our country,” Trump bellowed. “That’s what they’ve done. They poison mental institutions and prisons all over the world, not just in South America, not just to three or four countries that we think about, but all over the world. They’re coming into our country from Africa, from Asia, all over the world.”

He doubled down later that day on his social media outlet with this:  “ILLEGAL IMMIGRATION IS POISONING THE BLOOD OF OUR NATION. THEY’RE COMING FROM PRISONS, FROM MENTAL INSTITUTIONS — FROM ALL OVER THE WORLD. WITHOUT BORDERS & FAIR ELECTIONS, YOU DON’T HAVE A COUNTRY. MAKE AMERICA GREAT AGAIN!”

It’s covering ground we’ve covered before, but it’s worth reminding ourselves and others that both the idea and Trump’s words about immigrants’ “blood poisoning” came straight from the pages of Adolph Hitler in “Mein Kampf.”  He’s obsessed with Hitler and his immoral and disgusting ideas of ethnic and racial purity, this grandson of German immigrants. Saturday was the second or third time Trump has used Hitler’s words to sell the idea that this country is somehow being ruined by a new generation of the people who comprise it – the immigrants who come to our shores as displaced and downtrodden and then build not only a life for themselves but a country in which to live it.

Here in a small town in Northeast Pennsylvania, we don’t get out much.  Tracy and I have traveled only once since we moved here, to my Uncle James’ funeral at Monticello last year, and we drove, not flew.  In fact, before this week, I hadn’t gotten on an airplane since I flew to my sister’s wedding in the Seattle area in 2016.

But there I was early Thursday morning at Newark Liberty Airport looking for Gate 24 in Terminal A for my flight to Knoxville through Dulles Airport in Virginia.  When the plane boarded, I found myself seated next to a young man from China who worked for a bank headed to Washington for some sort of meeting with banking regulators.  The guy who helped me stow my bag in the overhead compartment was from the Philippines.  The family seated behind us was from Chile.  The guy seated across the aisle from us was from Russia.

The guy at the desk at the Airport Hilton who checked me in on Thursday was from Scotland.  The women in a team of two who cleaned my room were from Guatemala and El Salvador. 

Flying back from Knoxville on Saturday, I sat next to a guy in his 30’s from Switzerland who is working at Oak Ridge National Laboratory as a nuclear engineer.  He deals with highly enriched uranium and travels around the country surveying its handling at nuclear reactors. He was connecting to Geneva at Dulles on his way home to visit his family for Christmas.  On my connecting flight to Newark, I sat next to a middle-aged couple from Belgium who were on their way to Newark to fly to Brussels to see their families for Christmas before returning to their home in Maryland between Washington and Baltimore.

The people I’m talking about here all spoke English.  They had jobs in the United States.  They paid U.S. taxes.  They spent most if not all their income in the economies of the states in which they lived and worked. To a person, they were happy with their lives here.  Who among these immigrants was a blood poisoner? 

Friedrich Heinrich Trump was a German businessman who immigrated to the United States in 1885.  He ran a restaurant in a town outside of Seattle for a while, and when the Klondike gold rush hit in the Yukon, he moved to a gold mining town in Canada and opened a hotel, restaurant and brothel serving gold miners.  In 1901, he sold his share in the business to his partner. 

Later that year, he moved back to Kallstadt, the town he came from in Germany.  He worked as a restaurant manager and barber until the German authorities determined that he had originally immigrated to the U.S. to avoid military service.  In 1905, he was deported to the U.S. as a draft dodger.  He lived for a time in the Bronx where his son, Fred, was born before he moved his family to Queens.  He worked managing a hotel on 6^th Avenue in Manhattan and bought some real estate in Queens.  He died in 1918 from one of the first cases of Spanish flu in what became the deadliest epidemic of the 20^th Century. 

His son Fred inherited the real estate he had at his death in Queens and turned it into a large empire of apartment buildings in Queens and Brooklyn.  His grandson, Donald, inherited the real estate Fred had developed after his father’s death. 

The Trumps were an immigrant family that made good in the 20^th Century, along with millions of other immigrant families that did the same thing in other businesses in other places in the U.S..  They had jobs, they paid taxes, they reinvested their income in more and more real estate until Friedrich’s grandson, Donald, began investing in things like Trump brand vodka and the Trump airline and Atlantic City casinos and Trump hotels and Trump University.  Donald made and lost the fortune left to him by his father and grandfather several times over.

Then he ran for president and began his years of poisoning not our nation’s blood, but its politics with ideas he stole from Adolph Hitler, among others. He’s still doing it, running for president yet again, on a platform that promises, if you liked me before, you’re going to love me this time around.   

If he wins, he’ll do the same thing to the fortunes of this country that he did to the fortune left to him by his immigrant family.  He’ll leave it in ruins.