Heather Mac Donald, the Thomas W. Smith Fellow at the Manhattan Institute, is a national treasure. She’s brilliant, absolutely fearless, and a great writer. Those qualities make her invaluable to those who seek clarity on the big issues of the day.
Mac Donald is taking aim at the subculture that finds racism not only to be the root of all evil but a crime worse than murder. She points to a New York Times article from April 10 that discussed a Trump posting on Truth Social about a bloody hammer attack on a legal immigrant in Florida that left the innocent woman dead and the illegal alien attacker from Haiti, Rolbert Joachin, the subject of sympathy by the Times.
Apparently, our mean, racist president blamed the murder on Joe Biden letting 9 million illegal aliens into the U.S. unvetted and gave temporary protected status (TPS) to Haitians. Trump referred to the failed state of Haiti as a “s**thole” in 2018, which wasn’t very polite of him, but the Times didn’t bother to dispute the characterization of the island.
“Trump Shares Video of Graphic Attack and Rails Against Haitians,” blares the Times headline.
Trump has been trying to get rid of the TPS program for years. He calls it a “massively abused and fraudulent program which my Administration is working to terminate.” In this case, Joachin had overstayed the TPS designation and should have left or been deported in 2024. Instead, he ended up on the streets, a nuisance in Fort Myers. Fla.
Mac Donald describes the video Trump posted. Kevin Downey posted it earlier, but if you haven’t seen it, I recommend watching it only if you have a strong stomach.
On April 3, a surveillance camera at a gas station convenience store in Fort Myers, Florida, filmed a burly man methodically bashing in the windows and hood of a parked car with a hammer. The audio captures the blows’ explosive force. When the vandal starts in on the driver’s side windows, a woman exits the convenience store and calls out to him. He strides over to her, winds up as if for a pitch, and lands a massive strike on her head. She falls to the ground. As she lies on her back, spread-eagled, the assailant lands six more blows on her skull. Initially, her arms twitch upwards with each strike, but then she moves no more. The murderer steps over her body and walks away.
“To my fellow Republicans, and frankly all Common Senses Americans, NEVER FORGET that Joe Biden and the Democrat Party turned the United States of America into a dumping ground, allowing Tens of MILLIONS of Criminals, Lunatics, and the Mentally Insane from all over the World to pour into our Country, totally unvetted and unchecked through our wide Open Borders,” Trump wrote.
It’s an exaggeration, which is something Trump is wont to do. About 9 million illegals were allowed into the U.S during the Biden years, not “tens of MILLIONS,” (many of whom have since gone home or been deported), and they were, in fact, screened, not “unvetted and unchecked,” although not as rigorously as they should have been. There’s also a germ of truth as well. The TPS program was abused by immigrants and groups promoting the program, and many people who never lived in the 12 countries for which TPS was designated managed to enter the U.S. anyway.
To the New York Times, the story and the scandal here is Trump’s Truth Social post, not the psychotic bludgeoning. Trump “has made disparaging comments about Haitian immigrants for years,” the paper informed its readers. The Times quickly introduces an immigrant rights activist to offer moral clarity. “Guerline Jozef, the executive director of the immigrant rights nonprofit Haitian Bridge Alliance, said that the president’s comments were in line with his administration’s history of targeting Haitian people and spreading false narratives. ‘They don’t see the humanity of immigrants,’ she said.”
The real victims in this episode, according to the Times and its sources, are Haitian migrants and other Third World border breakers. “’What President Trump is doing is weaponizing and continuing to attack and traumatize and terrorize communities of color, specifically Haitian immigrants,’” Jozef tells the paper.
It wasn’t until “nine paragraphs into the article that the Times gets around to saying what Joachin actually did,” writes Mac Donald. She quotes the Times story, “The video shows a man using a hammer to smash a car parked outside a store. A woman later emerges from the store and approaches the man. He walks toward her, hits her in the head with the hammer and keeps striking her after she falls to the ground.”
“This sanitized account leaves out the shocking physical force of the attack and the killer’s sangfroid in carrying it out,” observes Mac Donald.
The Times asked the White House why Trump posted the gruesome video. “President Trump will always share the truth with the American people, even when the media tries to hide it,” responded a presidential spokeswoman.
Indeed.
Other news outlets also ignored the crime until Trump’s Truth Social entry. That indifference shows how justified Trump was in making the post. But the other outlets at least acknowledged in their headlines that a murder had occurred. CNN wrote: “Trump posts graphic video of deadly hammer attack in Florida, putting renewed focus on immigration debate.”
The BBC announced: “Trump posts graphic video of slaying to argue for stricter immigration policies.”
A TV station in Texas wrote: “Trump shares video of a brutal Florida killing allegedly by Haitian immigrant.”
The Daily Beast, however, matched the Times’s fastidious indirection: “Trump Posts Sick Video in Live Social Media Breakdown.” It is the video that is “sick,” not the killing, according to the Daily Beast, in the typical left-wing swerve from personal responsibility. And it is Trump, not law and order, that is having a “breakdown.”
Trump was right to post the video and right to publicize the murder. His determination to speak out about individual crimes is a notable departure from usual presidential practice. The media keep Americans in the dark about urban and immigrant crime. Reading a sanitized description of the murder is no substitute for seeing its heinousness.
“Nowhere else in the modern Western world are people routinely and sometimes lethally assaulted by vagrants; nowhere else have streets been allowed to disintegrate into such squalor, filth, and threat,” writes Mac Donald. “Those conditions are the result of policy choices, not of uncontrollable economic or social forces.”
Those “policy choices,” including everything from lax borders to lax law enforcement to lax prosecution of offenders, and lax application of mental health statutes that should keep people like Rolbert Joachin locked up, are almost exclusively the product of Democratic Party politicians, lawmakers, judges, and bureaucrats.
That’s what all this misdirection is about: keeping the hands of the Democratic Party clean so no one remembers who’s responsible for the enshttification of America.
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