We oppose the visit of US Republican presidential hopeful Donald Trump to Scotland. His campaign has ramped up the level of racism in mainstream politics, and created a climate of reaction.
Join the “Stand Up to Trump” protest from 10am Friday 24 June Turnberry, to show that Donald Trump’s brand of bigotry is not welcome in Scotland.
He launched his campaign with a call to build a wall to keep Mexican immigrants out, as he says they are “criminals” and “rapists”.
Trump has called during the campaign for a “total and complete shutdown” of US borders to Muslims, giving the reason that, “our country cannot be the victims of horrendous attacks by people that believe only in Jihad, and have no sense of reason or respect for human life.”
A Black Lives Matter protester was pushed to the ground, punched and kicked at a Trump rally in Birmingham, Alabama, last November. The next day Trump commented, “Maybe he should have been roughed up, because it was absolutely disgusting what he was doing.”
A Trump supporter hit a black protester who being escorted out of a Trump rally at Fayetteville, North Carolina, by police. Trump responded to the protest, saying, “See, in the good old days this doesn’t happen, because they used to treat them very, very rough. And when they protested once, you know, they would not do it again so easily. But today they walk in and they put their hand up and they put the wrong finger in the air at everybody and they get away with murder because we’ve become weak, we’ve become weak.”
There is barely any coded language here in its appeal to racists. Can he be referring to any period other than the Civil Rights Movement when black people had to demonstrate and protest for equality in the US. Trump’s “good old days” seem to hark to a period before Martin Luther King led peaceful demonstrations in Birmingham, Alabama.
Trump’s own website makes the claim that, “For many years, Mexico’s leaders have been taking advantage of the United States by using illegal immigration to export the crime and poverty in their own country”. It demands that Mexico pays for the wall he wants to construct along the border.
Trump has shown that his hatred of people of Mexican descent is not just aimed at current immigrants with recent attacks on judge Gonzalo Curiel. Trump said the judge should not be allowed to hear a case concerning Trump because of his Mexican heritage.
The scapegoating of Muslims and migrants is all to common in current politics, but Trump is trying to drag the politics of the gutter to the mainstream.