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Old habits die hard. The first Republican attacks on President Biden as he carried out the withdrawal of U.S. troops from Afghanistan former President Trump initially negotiated with the Taliban more than a year ago was that Biden wasn’t doing enough to help evacuate Afghan allies who assisted the U.S. war effort for 20 years.
Then Wisconsin was designated as one of five states to house thousands of Afghan refugees flown to safety along with Americans in one of the largest U.S. airlifts in history. Suddenly, state Republicans remembered how frightened they were of terrorism from brown-skinned, Muslim refugees, one of the central tenets of Trump’s presidency.
Trump was happy to do his part to resume stoking of racist fears of immigrants within the party. Still banned from major social media for spreading dangerous lies, Trump alerted rightwing media to demand to know: “How many terrorists will Joe Biden bring to America?”
That was clearly on the minds of Sen. Ron Johnson and all five Republican state congressmen participating in separate tours last week of Fort McCoy, a rural military property spread across 60,000 acres between Tomah and Sparta temporarily housing up to 10,000 refugees. All they saw were soldiers helping to settle families into barracks and playing outside with children, but they found it concerning.
Johnson had to acknowledge: “It sounds like the first group of people that arrived here are just relieved to have been able to escape Afghanistan ... The vast majority are here wanting what we want, the opportunity to raise their families in safety and security.”
Unidentified Sources
But Johnson quickly reverted to his default, Trumpian settings, adding: “It only takes one failure to destroy this mission ... There is a danger to this country.” Johnson claimed to have unidentified sources who dispute administration assurances Afghan arrivals have been well-vetted.
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The total lack of any actual evidence is a regular feature of such Republican claims. Two members of the congressional delegation—Tom Tiffany and Scott Fitzgerald—were among the 147 Republican House members who voted after the violent insurrection on Jan. 6 to throw out millions of legally cast votes in Arizona and Pennsylvania because Trump falsely claimed without any evidence they were fraudulent.
Tiffany has been one of the most vociferous opponents to allowing Afghan refugees into the U.S. at all. He put out an early statement: “Our national security has been deeply degraded in the months since Jan. 20 (when Biden was inaugurated) and allowing the mass entry of foreigners from a known hotbed of terrorism will only make this situation far worse.”
Because of the tragedy of 13 U.S. troops killed in a terrorist suicide bombing in the final days of the withdrawal, Trump and Republicans are trying to pretend everything would have gone far better if Trump were still president. That’s a highly dubious proposition since Trump was never able to organize any successful national operation as president including any coherent plan to protect the lives of 600,000 Americans killed by a pandemic.
Trump’s ‘Peace Deal’
In fact, the so-called “peace deal” Trump signed with Taliban in February 2020 would have given Trump less time to get all Americans and their Afghan allies out of the country by May 1. Trump now says Biden should “resign in disgrace for what he has allowed to happen to Afghanistan” by withdrawing U.S. troops just like Trump promised to do. Trump also denounced Biden for failing to “blow up all the forts” as if he thought U.S. forces were still fighting in the Middle Ages.
Stephen Miller, the White House advisor who drafted Trump’s vicious racially and religiously bigoted anti-immigration policies, has reemerged from his retirement under a rock to explain on Fox News: “Resettling in America is not about solving a humanitarian crisis. It’s about accomplishing an ideological objective—to change America.”
The viewers were way ahead of him. They tune in to Fox News regularly to hear Tucker Carlson explain white replacement theory. “It is immigration from other nations more than anything else that has driven political transformation,” Carlson tells them. “Our leaders have no right to encourage foreigners to move to this country in order to change election results. Doing that is an attack on our democracy.” That’s “our” democracy, the democracy of white people.
There’s a reason white folks who are terrified of losing all the lop-sided advantages of white supremacy they’ve known all their lives are called Dead Enders. The battle’s already over and they lost. America is already a racially diverse nation and will only continue to become more so.
Here’s even better news. Life will be better for everyone in a democracy built on the beautiful ideals of our founding fathers (who were not at all racially or gender diverse themselves) to create a nation in which all are treated equally with unalienable legal rights.
