How Does Trump Choose What Counts as a Group to Punish?
Donald Trump and his enablers regularly punish large groups of people for the perceived sins of one person, or at most the sins of a much narrower set of people. Group punishment (also called collective punishment) happens to be a war crime, most fundamentally because it is the intentional infliction of harm on innocent people. Worse than punishing people's direct relatives in a Hatfields-versus-McCoys way -- which is plenty bad -- group punishment is based on finding an arbitrary connection among people, something like saying that it is not only a perpetrator's immediate family who are "guilty" and thus punishable but that the in-laws of his 18th cousins thrice removed must also pay the price.
And yes, group punishment truly is immoral, as decent people and international law have agreed at least since the end of World War II. My concern today is with the almost random way in which Trump identifies the relevant "kinship" bond when he decides to punish people, which has become a perversely fascinating thing to behold. That he declares such bonds in an unimaginably broad way extends the injustice.
To be clear, we have recently seen plenty of ways in which Trump's statements make no sense, not all of which have any obvious connection to group punishment. There was, for example, the incident last week when Trump spoke to a group of oil executives, attempting to take a victory lap for his actions in Venezuela by telling them that they would benefit from his "acting presidency" of that country because its oil reserves are the largest in the world. Plenty of observers soon pointed out that those claimed reserves suddenly tripled when Hugo Chavez -- the predecessor of Trump's arrestee, Nicolas Maduro, and the subject of some bizarre conspiracy theories about the 2020 US presidential election -- simply ordered that certain types of non-reserves be reclassified as reserves.
That in turn means that the oil reserves that Trump was touting are economically useless, and he was making his claims to the people who possess the most knowledge about such things . One person had the presence of mind (or courage, or perhaps a lack of a personal filter) to say so out loud. Darren Woods, the CEO, of ExxonMobil, said that Venezuela was "uninvestable," which is apparently uncontroversially true. Well, uncontroversial to those who care about facts. Trump, however, became angry and famously said this: "I didn't like Exxon's response. ... They're playing too cute." Some commentators have noted that this is another example of the petulance of the current occupant of the Oval Office, but it was the words hidden inside the ellipsis in that quote that were less widely reported: "I'll probably be inclined to keep Exxon out."
It surely is true that there is a huge dollop of attempted retaliation there, but what most people seem to have missed is that the proposed punishment -- punishment, to be clear, for ExxonMobil's sin of saying that Venezuelan oil is uninvestable -- is to prevent them from investing in Venezuelan oil. Wow, what a threat! "I don't like that house." "Oh yeah, well I'm not gonna let you buy it!"
As ridiculous as that whole situation is, it seems at first blush not to fit into the category of group punishment. If anything, it is an example of singling out someone and trying (in this case incompetently) to punish them. A next step would be to tell everyone who was in that room that none of their companies could invest in Venezuelan oil (which, again, they would surely not mind) because of what Woods said. But to this point, the punishment -- outlandish and petty as it is -- was individualized punishment for an individual sin. Or was it? One could observe that there is group punishment in the fact that thousands of people work for and own shares of ExxonMobil, and Trump is eager to harm all of them (at least in his mind, where Venezuela's oil is a big prize) for something that none of them did. Even so, I concede that the more important part of this story is that the supposed sin was no sin at all.
Trump's more typical resort to group punishment shows up, of course, in his complaints about racial and ethnic groups. He recently said out loud that "White people were very badly treated" by civil rights laws in higher education, repeating the age-old complaint about "reverse discrimination" in college admissions. Even without that public utterance, however, it has long been clear that Trump is an enthusiastic spokesman for the idea that people in certain minority groups deserve to be punished as a group today because someone enacted laws that helped some people who "looked like them" at some point in the past.
How clear has it been? He began his 2016 presidential campaign proclaiming that Mexicans are "drug dealers, criminals, and rapists." Soon after, he called for "a total and complete shutdown of Muslims entering the United States until our country's representatives can figure out what is going on." What many have long forgotten is the context in which he made that announcement. As NPR put it at the time:
Trump's call comes one day after President Obama's address from the Oval Office in the aftermath of the San Bernardino, Calif., shootings that were carried out by an apparently self-radicalized married couple. The male shooter was an American citizen, born in the United States. His wife was born in Pakistan but was in the U.S. legally on a visa for fiancees.
As if that was not bad enough (or even worse, that the Supreme Court ended up allowing Trump's modified Muslim ban to stand), Trump just two months ago responded to a murder committed by one Afghan national in the US by saying that he "will permanently pause migration from all Third World Countries to allow the U.S. system to fully recover." Leaving aside the puzzling notion of a "permanent pause," this is even broader than the Muslim ban in his first term. Now, he is saying that anyone of any religion who is from a poor country (except for White South Africans, of course) should not be allowed to enter the US. Again, this is in response to a truly terrible thing that one Afghan man did. Group punishment.
Moving on, why is he so fixated on Somalis? He hates Rep. Ilhan Omar, so all Somalis must suffer. Although there is unquestionably a lot of racism tied up in that particular hatred (highlighted by his comment about her "little turban"), but now we are getting into some interesting variations on the ways in which the illogic of group punishment works.
Many people pointed out, for example, that the Bush-Cheney administration chose to invade Iraq in retaliation for what Iraq did not do. But even if the Iraqi government had been culpable for 9/11 in the way that, say, Saudi Arabia was, the US simply does not apply the same logic to all acts of terrorism. For instance, after the 1995 Oklahoma City bombing, the US military did not invade Niagara County in western New York, even though that is where the bomber was born.
How do those who want to punish a group decide what the common characteristic is that defines the group? Is it people with attached earlobes versus those with dangling earlobes? Is the targeted group all people whose last names end in vowels? (Good luck, JD Vance.) People whose high schools had animal mascots?
Those might seem fanciful, but Trump's group punishments are becoming ever more inventive in deciding who shall be in the unlucky group. How about "children whose parents need childcare in order to work"? Why not?
The Trump administration's crackdown on the $12 billion Child Care and Development Fund, which subsidizes care for 1.4 million children from low-income households, has rattled child care providers and families that rely on the aid money. Citing unspecified allegations of fraud, Trump administration officials are requiring states to provide extra documentation before receiving the money.
There, it is not even a matter of grossly generalizing from the sins of one "type" of person to everyone who can be labeled as part of that group, because the apparent claim is that someone, somewhere has committed fraud (surely true, in any large enough program, public or private), so everyone in a specific group must suffer.
Somehow, it becomes weirder and weirder. As I noted in a column last week, "when Ontario's otherwise-terrible Premier Doug Ford ran an advertisement in some US media markets showing Ronald Reagan criticizing tariffs, Trump responded by ending trade talks with Canada, saying that the Reagan clip was fake (note: it was real)." And Trump's ambassador to Canada then "ridiculed people who point out the ad was backed by the Ontario government and not the federal government. 'I'm sorry, we don't go through that slicing and dicing.'" In other words, Trump's team is not even willing to limit the size of the group to be punished based on which government did the "bad" thing. It is all Canadians who must suffer. Why not all hockey fans? Why not everyone who likes maple syrup?
But truly we reached a new low in group punishment when Trump this week blamed the government of Norway for not awarding him the Nobel Peace Prize last Fall. In a text mocked 'round the world, Trump wrote to that country's prime minister: "Considering your Country decided not to give me the Nobel Peace Prize for having stopped 8 Wars PLUS, I no longer feel an obligation to think purely of Peace, although it will always be predominant, but can now think about what is good and proper for the United States of America."
Because an Oslo-based private organization hurt his feelings, he is blaming the Norwegian government and punishing the people of Greenland, Denmark, and the other European countries that stand against him. Recall that Norway was one of the non-"shithole countries" whose people Trump once longed to lure to our shores. Now, it appears that he is willing to sweep ever larger and more arbitrary classifications of people into the groups to be punished. Is it progress that the arbitrary lines that he is drawing are no longer exclusively racial or ethnic? I suppose it depends on what one calls progress. But innocents are still being targeted, and that is an abomination.
- Neil H. Buchanan