Mother Jones illustration; Gerald Herbert/AP
Five months ago, during a GOP presidential debate, CNN’s Jake Tapper asked Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis whether he’d endorse ethnic cleansing. “Do you support the mass removal of Palestinians from Gaza?” Tapper inquired.
“As president, I am not going to tell [the Israeli government] to do that. I think there’s a lot of issues with that,” DeSantis said. “But if they make the calculation that to avert a second Holocaust, they need to do that—I think some of these Palestinian Arabs, Saudi Arabia should take some. Egypt should take some.”
Even in the context of all the violence and bigotry that so many people have endured since the October 7 Hamas attack on Israel and the subsequent Israeli assault on Gaza, DeSantis’ comments were shocking—difficult to explain, much less to comprehend. But tonight, on a different presidential debate stage, the man who defeated DeSantis for the Republican nomination showed us the kind of unvarnished racism and dehumanization that might indeed lead a politician to casually sanction war crimes.
Donald Trump criticized Joe Biden’s efforts to broker a ceasefire between Israel and Hamas, insisting that Biden should let Israel “finish the job.” Then the former president reduced an entire people into a political insult. Biden has “become like a Palestinian,” Trump said. “But they don’t like him because he’s a very bad Palestinian. He’s a weak one.”
It was an awful moment on an awful night in an awful presidential campaign. It’s only going to get worse.
