Trump on undocumented immigrants: 'These aren't people. These are animals.'

[Dill]

(05-25-2018, 02:08 PM)PhilHos Wrote: I didn't go through the whole thread but on the second page of this thread I found the following posts which are NOT of you making the claim; however, they do seem to imply or you seemingly want us to infer that Trump was really calling all immigrants animals.

Let me offer a hypothesis which should explain every statement I have made about Trump's "animals" comment.

Bels was right to see Trump as off in a revery and suddenly jolted back to reality by the mention of "MS 13". 

Trump then begins to ramble, slipping quickly from MS 14 to talking about the kind of "people" who cross the border--"animals."  But I don't agree with Bels that Trump was "plainly" talking about MS 13 then. People just decide that he was or decide that he was not, or like me, say that his wording lends itself to misconstruction and don't feel a strong need to come down on one side or the other.

Bfine inadvertently drew attention to the problem when he rephrased Trump's words to add the demonstrative pronoun, which suddenly dispelled all fog. Had Trump actually done that, there would be no kerfuffle over his intentions.
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But there is a kerfuffle because 1) Trump didn't use a demonstrative, limiting pronoun, and 2) because of his past negative statements about immigrants, his penchant for characterizing them as rapists and killers long before the focus on MS 13. Thus some wonder if he was really referring to all immigrants. The battle then is over context clues and Trump's history of negative stereotyping of immigrants.

So I see a linguistic "bump" on the road between "MS 13" and "people"  which lends itself to misconstruction of this particular speaker's words, as it would not, say, to the words of Marco Rubio or Jeb Bush, had they spoken that carelessly.

Thus I kept asking Bfine "why the shift from MS 13 to people" because it is a sloppy transition from a specific to a general category which invites misreading; it does not support a dogmatic claim that the president who wants to deport millions who are "not Mexico's best" and punitively separate children from parents just couldn't have meant anything else.

I refused a binary choice (not to imply that all binary choices should be refused, or that all choices are binary) and that's why you don't see me agreeing that Trump is "plainly" speaking of MS 13, and why you can't find any statements claiming that he is not. But you do find me challenging claims of plain meaning. That's all.