COMMENTARY By likening Trump's immigrant-demonization crusade to Lincoln's abolition of slavery, Miami U.S. Rep. María Elvira Salazar risks discrediting her own Lincolnesque immigration reform efforts.
On this eve of America’s birthday, I have a question for my congresswoman, María Elvira Salazar.
What if I were to suggest, in a speech to some far left-wing political conference, that Cuban President Miguel Díaz-Canel “will be for democracy what José Martí was for independence”?
I would of course never liken the insipid Díaz-Canel or his repressive communist regime to Cuba’s inspiring 19th-century freedom hero, Martí.
But if I did, Salazar — a Republican, Cuban-American U.S. Representative from Miami — would blast me as a subversive socialista more loudly than the Pillow Guy hawks conspiracy theories at CPAC.
Which, coincidentally, is where Salazar actually did insult Hoosiers like me last weekend.
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At the first-ever Latino edition of the far right-wing CPAC, or Conservative Political Action Conference, on Saturday in Hollywood, Salazar announced that President Donald Trump “will be for immigration what Lincoln was for slavery and what Reagan was for communism.”
It was the Lincoln part of that quote that made my jaw crash to the floor.
As I mentioned, I’m a Hoosier — a native of Indiana, where America’s greatest president, Abraham Lincoln, was raised. So I was jolted by Salazar's Trump-Lincoln equation — almost as hard as a Cuban exile would be to hear the likes of Díaz-Canel compared to Martí, who died trying to liberate Cuba from the Spanish Empire.
Trump's sophomoric Alligator Alcatraz remarks didn't exactly make America see his red MAGA cap metamorphosing into Lincoln's silk stovepipe hat.
Hoosiers take rich pride in our link to Lincoln — our country’s 19th-century hero — and not just because he ended slavery in the U.S. and preserved the Union.
Through his lofty words and actions, Lincoln rescued and exalted the core idea that America stands for: e pluribus unum — out of many, one — the beacon-of-the-world experiment of self-government and equality.
But let’s look closely at what Salazar highlighted: slavery.
Lincoln’s 1863 Emancipation Proclamation was a nation-ennobling achievement. It gave, as he put it in his iconic Gettysburg Address, “a new birth” to what the Founding Fathers had written in the Declaration of Independence a century earlier but had failed to uphold: the “self-evident” truth “that all men are created equal.”
Now America could be what it claimed to be.
Just as important, Lincoln saw it through in a healing spirit of national reconciliation and decency. “With malice toward none, with charity for all,” he said in his Second Inaugural Address, “…let us strive on … to bind up the nation’s wounds.”
Crass zig-zagging
Now, here’s President Trump this week holding forth on immigration — the issue Salazar believes will raise him next to giants like Lincoln and Ronald Reagan in our national pantheon:
“We’re going to teach [migrant detainees] how to run away from an alligator if they escape prison. Don’t run in a straight line. Run like this [in a zig-zag motion]. And you know what? Your chances go up about 1%.”
Wow. America could just see Trump’s red MAGA cap metamorphosing into Lincoln's silk stovepipe hat, couldn’t we?
Trump made those sophomoric remarks this week on his way to visit the new migrant detention center in the Florida Everglades, dubbed “Alligator Alcatraz.” It’s part of his crusade — authoritarian and xenophobic, often community-traumatizing and sometimes less-than-legal — to round up and deport millions of undocumented migrants, with or without criminal histories.
His performance was crass, given the dehumanizing, immigrants-as-gator-prey concept behind Alligator Alcatraz.
It was doubly so amid the news about 75-year-old Cuban migrant Isidro Perez. He came to the U.S. in 1966 to escape communism — but died last week in Miami’s federal Krome detention center after immigration agents, desperate to meet the deportation quotas Trump has set, arrested him because of a marijuana crime he committed more than 40 years ago.
A 75-year-old.
That’s where Rep. Salazar’s Lincoln analogy, to use Trump’s new favorite word, gets obliterated.
Yes, I understand that she presumably meant Trump wants to eradicate illegal immigration the way Lincoln abolished slavery. But Lincoln likely would have taken the path of congressional immigration reform that unifies the nation, not immigrant-demonization cruelty that fractures it.
I’m also aware that Salazar, ironically, made her Trump-as-Lincoln comment at CPAC Latino even as she was urging Trump to stop the mass deportation insanity and put long-standing, law-abiding undocumented migrants on a path to legal status, per her Dignity Act bill.
Her legislation is Lincolnesque.
Trump is not.
