{"id":5989,"date":"2016-03-07T23:57:36","date_gmt":"2016-03-07T23:57:36","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.rationalargumentator.com\/index\/?p=5989"},"modified":"2016-03-07T23:57:36","modified_gmt":"2016-03-07T23:57:36","slug":"one-bad-reason-hate-trump","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.rationalargumentator.com\/index\/blog\/2016\/03\/one-bad-reason-hate-trump\/","title":{"rendered":"One Bad Reason to Hate Trump – Article by Sarah Skwire"},"content":{"rendered":"
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\"The<\/a>Sarah Skwire<\/span>
\n<\/big><\/big><\/strong><\/div>\n<\/div>\n
******************************<\/div>\n
<\/div>\n
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99 Reasons, But the Name Ain’t One
\n<\/em><\/strong><\/p>\n

I have 99 (thousand) reasons to hate Donald Trump and to find his campaign stomach turning. I won\u2019t list them here. The Google graph showing the rising use of the word \u201cbloviate\u201d in American political discourse should stand in place of any detailed accounting.<\/p>\n

\"bloviategraph\"<\/a><\/p>\n

But what\u2019s grabbed most of the attention since John Oliver mentioned it recently on his show, Last Week Tonight<\/em>, is Trump\u2019s name. As Oliver notes, \u201cTrump sounds like money.\u201d But, he continues in tones of shock and dismay, \u201cIt turns out the name Trump was not always his family name.\u2026 An ancestor had changed it to Trump from Drumpf.\u201d<\/p>\n

My family name wasn\u2019t originally Skwire. It was Skwirsky. My grandfather and his brothers changed it \u2014 right around when Trump\u2019s ancestor changed the family name \u2014 because back in those days, it was hard to get jobs in the United States with an obviously foreign name. Trump\u2019s ancestors, I\u2019m sure, did the same thing.<\/p>\n

There\u2019s no shame in being from places that aren\u2019t America. There\u2019s no shame in having a last name that\u2019s unusual. And I am bothered by the pleasure we are taking in mocking a name that sounds a little bit funny and a whole lot foreign. It sounds like the kind of rhetoric Trump uses. So I\u2019m not going to indulge.<\/p>\n

However.<\/p>\n

(And this is a very big \u201chowever.\u201d)<\/p>\n

I do think there\u2019s something to talk about here, and I don\u2019t think it\u2019s funny at all.<\/p>\n

The focus on Trump\u2019s original family name is not analogous to the focus on former Republican presidential candidate Chris Christie\u2019s ample girth. Governor Christie\u2019s poundage was immaterial to his campaign. He has not publically bloviated about the need for the obese to stop being lazy, to start exercising, and to start eating right. He has not signed on to regulatory agendas like former New York mayor Michael Bloomberg\u2019s attempts to control what and how much people eat and drink. He hasn\u2019t, in other words, turned his weight into a centerpiece of his campaign.<\/p>\n

Trump, however, has made immigration one of his central issues. Even those of us who have tried desperately to avoid the whole political season have heard that he wants a bigger wall along the border with Mexico, that he wants Mexico to pay for it, and that he would deport 11 million illegal immigrants in short order. A little research turns up Trump’s repeated references to immigrants as criminals, drug dealers, and rapists. Birthright citizenship is dumb, he opines. And the barriers to immigration should be towering, because, Trump says over and over, the people born here should be our first concern.<\/p>\n

It\u2019s not funny that Trump\u2019s family name used to be Drumpf. That\u2019s just a standard American story that most of us probably share. To be an American, for most of us, means we\u2019re not really from around here.<\/p>\n

But the idea that we might have an American president who thinks it\u2019s fine for the Drumpf family to come to America and achieve unimagined success in a few generations, but who will do everything possible to keep the Rodriguez family or the Habib family from doing the same?<\/p>\n

That\u2019s a tragedy.<\/p>\n

Sarah Skwire<\/a> is the poetry editor of the Freeman<\/em> and\u00a0a senior fellow at Liberty Fund, Inc. She is a poet and author of the writing textbook Writing with a Thesis<\/em><\/a>.\u00a0She is a member of the FEE\u00a0Faculty Network<\/a>.<\/strong><\/p>\n

This article was published by The Foundation for Economic Education <\/a>and may be freely distributed, subject to a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License<\/a>, which requires that credit be given to the author.<\/strong><\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Sarah Skwire ****************************** 99 Reasons, But the Name Ain’t One I have 99 (thousand) reasons to hate Donald Trump and to find his campaign stomach turning. I won\u2019t list them here. The Google graph showing the rising use of the word \u201cbloviate\u201d in American political discourse should stand in place of any detailed accounting. But what\u2019s grabbed most of the attention since John Oliver mentioned it recently on his show, Last Week Tonight, is Trump\u2019s name. As Oliver notes, \u201cTrump…<\/p>\n

Read More Read More<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[87,5],"tags":[4598,4220,4599,2664,2665,1148,876,4601,4600,4330,2207],"class_list":["post-5989","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-culture","category-politics","tag-2016-presidential-election","tag-donald-trump","tag-drumpf","tag-fee","tag-foundation-for-economic-education","tag-immigrants","tag-immigration","tag-john-oliver","tag-last-week-tonight","tag-prejudice","tag-sarah-skwire"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rationalargumentator.com\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5989","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rationalargumentator.com\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rationalargumentator.com\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rationalargumentator.com\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rationalargumentator.com\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=5989"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.rationalargumentator.com\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5989\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":5992,"href":"https:\/\/www.rationalargumentator.com\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5989\/revisions\/5992"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rationalargumentator.com\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=5989"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rationalargumentator.com\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=5989"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rationalargumentator.com\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=5989"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}