9 hours ago
Trump accused of white supremacy
Annie Guest: Earlier, I spoke to migrant activist and Professor Dylan Rodriguez from the Black and Cultural Studies departments at the University of California, Riverside. Professor Dylan Rodriguez, you've not been among the protesters in Los Angeles, but among some of the activist groups. Can you tell us what was your gut reaction to learning that President Trump ordered the deployment of National Guard troops?
Dylan Rodriguez: I will say that I, among many others in the communities of organizers and solidarity supporters in the surrounding area and throughout the United States, were quite unsurprised. Why is that? By the mobilisation? Well, we've been waiting for the escalation to happen. And the escalation has already been happening. The way the Trump administration has been operating has been through, you know, spectacles of retaliation against real and perceived political enemies. And the entire state of California, in the view of the Trump administration, is itself an entire geographical and political area of retaliation. So, this is not surprising.
Annie Guest: Donald Trump posted online that he sent the National Guard in to restore order, saying LA has been invaded and occupied by what he called illegal aliens and criminals with insurrectionist mobs attacking to stop the deportation operations by federal agents. What do you say to that?
Dylan Rodriguez: Well, I'll say that this exhibits some of the prototypical hypocrisy and dishonesty. What he's pronounced is, as always, a pretext to play out his, on the one hand, his political whims and on the other hand, to normalise, and I want to emphasize that term, to normalise a state of one directional domestic warfare.
Annie Guest: What do you mean by domestic warfare conducted by his administration?
Dylan Rodriguez: Trump is using the inflammatory and racist rhetoric of illegal immigrants, which comes from an old reservoir of white supremacist depictions of brown and black people crossing borders. And it's used as a pretext to mobilise and normalise police violence, repressive police violence, and in this case, National Guard violence, so it actually goes beyond the police at this point on a domestic population.
Annie Guest: What do you say is the president's endgame?
Dylan Rodriguez: This is all traceable to Project 2025. Trump is simply a figurehead for this execution of what is a somewhat orthodox version of white supremacist fascism in the United States.
Annie Guest: You've accused President Trump of white supremacy there, but he says that he's simply deporting or arranging a deportation of illegal immigrants. Can you remind us, what is President Trump's stated immigration policy and how do you say it differs to previous administrations?
Dylan Rodriguez: Well, that's a really important question and I think it's important to consider the premises of the question. On the one hand, I think it's important to note that there's actually more continuity than there is difference in terms of the actual policy. The second dimension of that is that I'm not sure the Trump administration knows what its immigration policy is at this point. I think what the Trump administration knows is that it's committed to a militarisation and a normalisation of policing and warfare against whatever it deems to be the target population at that time. And Trump will be consistent in some ways and in some ways seemingly whimsical. In this case, he's focused on California and he's focused on black and brown people in California, which is in some ways nothing new.
Annie Guest: Activist and Professor Dylan Rodriguez from the Black and Cultural Studies departments at the University of California, Riverside.
