Trump Campaign Rhetoric

In light of the recent election, a concerning social evil is the treatment of immigrants in the United States, specifically those of Latino/a backgrounds. The mimetic process was a particularly useful tool for the Trump campaign, as Trump’s hyperbolic and ignorant statements about immigrants resonated with caucasian, middle class Americans who imitated his hateful rhetoric and turned words into action. In the mimetic relationship, an individual or a group is victimized because of violence. The cycle of violence towards immigrants in the Trump campaign began as verbal, but the ideas behind Trump’s words inspired hate crimes and the reemergence of the Ku Klux Klan, which further validated this insularity. The solution to the mimetic process is

Trump took the role of the victim and dismantled the immigration system in the name of a slogan: “Make America Great Again.” This is his ideology; his constituency chooses to analyze the issue of immigration through this lense rather than grappling with the issue as a whole, asking critical questions, and determining the best solution. This cycle occurs because people live in a myth of sacrifice, wherein individuals are spiteful because of their mimetic desires. Mimetic rivalry inspires violence which motivates people to unify and blame a scapegoat. What the oppressor- Trump’s constituents- fail to realize is that the unity is only temporary; the scapegoat mechanism does not work and sacrificing is not the solution. Blaming immigrants for unemployment and crime rates is a diversionary tactic that avoids looking internally and realizing that these issues are the result of the inability of the white man to accept responsibility for his actions. For Girard, ending mimetic rivalry cannot be done through power; the Gospels reflect the anti-sacrificial motif of the Hebrew Bible and instead point to the gift of God’s love as the most effective means of treating evil. It is through the self sacrificial willingness to absorb evil and love one another that we corrode systematic oppression and address the problem of