It’s no secret that Harvard Law Professor Laurence Tribe isn’t a huge fan of President Donald Trump. While a lot of his past remarks about Trump have been about how to use the law to get him out of office, or legal arguments for why the Justice Department’s policy against indicting a sitting president is wrong, he’s now making a bold statement about Trump’s character and beliefs.
In a tweet Monday night, Tribe pointed to a Trump post from the weekend, saying that it was evidence of what the president’s “real agenda” is, and that it’s to “KEEP LATIN AMERICANS OUT OF THE U.S.” Trump’s tweet pointed to a Gallup poll that supposedly found that an “Open Borders” policy could lead to 42 million Latin Americans coming into the country. “This would be a disaster,” Trump said, calling for a wall on the Mexican border.
Tribe said that by calling an influx of Latin Americans a “disaster,” Trump was revealing an agenda that was “White Supremacy pure & simple.”
OMG. As @chrislhayes says, this rare moment of clarity reveals Trump’s real agenda: KEEP LATIN AMERICANS OUT OF THE U.S. It’s White Supremacy pure & simple. https://t.co/4dpfw0sqV8
— Laurence Tribe (@tribelaw) February 12, 2019
Tribe cited MSNBC’s Chris Hayes, borrowing Hayes’ language by stating that this tweet was a “rare moment of clarity” for the president. Hayes said Monday evening that this proves that Trump’s concern is “not criminals, not illegal immigrants, not human traffickers, not drug dealers,” but “Latin Americans.”
Of course, this is a selective reading of Trump’s tweet, which was quoting a poll. Just as Tribe and Hayes could focus on the use of “Latin Americans,” as evidence that Trump only cares about race, one could also look to the part that mentioned “Open Borders” and “42 million,” to say that he’s concerned about a mass influx of people entering the country without going through the legal immigration process. Hayes insisted that race is the real issue, pointing to a 2016 quote, not from Trump but his former adviser Steve Bannon. Bannon had said for Breitbart News Daily that besides illegal immigration, legal immigration has “overwhelmed the country.”
[Image via MSNBC screengrab]
