Trump is already making us numb to the horrific images his plans would create

In his increasingly rambling public speeches, Donald Trump appears to be speaking a version of Tamarian, a language first heard more than 30 years ago in a 1991 episode of Star Trek: The Next Generation. Spoken by a potentially hostile alien leader, Tamarian baffles the universal translator because it is not composed of nouns, verbs, adjectives, or any of the usual building blocks of language, but rather of allusions to myth, literature, and history, dense but meaningless without context.

Trump is now so ingrained in his base that he only has to mention the snake or MIT or names like Rachel Morin and Laken Riley for the crowd to know that these words represent, respectively, a fable about immigrants and misplaced trust, a Trump relative who taught at MIT decades ago, and victims of crimes allegedly committed by men who entered the United States illegally. Recently, a new reference has crept into the Trumpian lexicon: the woman with two beautiful children or the beautiful woman with a good family. It appears when Trump discusses the most ambitious and cruel plank of his policy agenda, the deportation of millions of undocumented immigrants, potentially as many as 11 million people who will be rounded up, herded into camps, and somehow sent back to countries they may not have seen in decades and that may be hostile and dangerous to them.

The Woman with Two Beautiful Children is an attempt to anticipate or neutralize the outrage, anger, and sadness over an act whose only recent precedents are profoundly un-American: the incarceration of Japanese Americans during World War II and the 1954 deportation of more than a million Mexican Americans by the Eisenhower administration, an event known by the terrible nickname Operation Wetback.

The picture is most vivid in a speech Trump gave in Detroit on June 15. He began with his signature promise: “On the first day of my new administration, we will launch the largest deportation operation in American history.” The next part must be read in its entirety and then analyzed: “And I’m not happy to say that either. And you know what’s going to happen? Well, take 10 terrorists and then a woman with two children who are beautiful children, and it’s going to be the front page of every newspaper.”

This echoes a line he uttered on Fox News’ “The Will Cain Show” on June 4 (“You’ll get rid of 10 really bad ones and one beautiful mother”). Paraphrased, Trump said: For every 10 (or 10,000 or 10 million) bad people we deport, the media will focus on images that depict the suffering of a few good people, maybe an attractive woman with beautiful children, which will cause outrage and make it difficult to continue the deportation.” This idea likely has its roots in comments he made during his 2016 presidential campaign, when the plight of Syrian refugees was in the news and Trump claimed they were a Trojan horse for terrorists trying to enter the United States.

Trump refers to a hypothetical image of something that has not yet happened and encourages Americans to harden their hearts against its emotional power. He extends his frequent dehumanization of immigrants as animals and criminals to what might be called photographic consciousness, the visceral power of images to galvanize public opinion and reorder the priorities of political life.

The history of the United States, a state that achieved imperial status in the age of photography, mass media, and television, has been shaped by our sensitivity to powerful images of trauma and suffering. The suffering of the Dust Bowl and the Great Depression lives on, condensed in memory, in Dorothea Lange’s image of a beautiful migrant with two beautiful children seeking comfort on each shoulder. The Vietnam War lives on in the nightmarish vision of children fleeing a napalm attack, foremost among them a naked, screaming girl named Kim Phuc.

Trump is no stranger to photographic consciousness, thanks to images that circulated during his first administration. In June 2019, images of Valeria Martnez, a 2-year-old girl from El Salvador, lying face down and dead in the reeds along the banks of the Rio Grande River sparked outrage over the Trump administration’s policy of limiting access to asylum seekers. Even some Republican politicians expressed horror at the image.

Photographic consciousness can be summed up in phrases that became commonplace after images of the Nazi death camps began circulating in 1945: “Never again and never forget.” The caption on an 1863 photograph by Timothy H. O’Sullivan showing corpses in a field after the Battle of Gettysburg is an early American expression of this idea: “Such a picture conveys a useful moral. Here are the gruesome details! Let them help prevent another calamity from overtaking the nation.”

After seeing Nick Uts’s heartbreaking photo of 9-year-old Kim Phuc, Richard M. Nixon said, “I wonder if that’s been corrected.” Trump, who frequently invokes fake news and lies, even though there are readily available transcripts, photos, and videos to refute his claims, is not suggesting that the next images of suffering migrants will be fabricated or fake, though he likely will be. For now, Trump is doing something more disturbing. He is perverting the logic of photographic consciousness. We no longer see an image of terrible suffering and say, “Never again.” Instead, we imagine the horrific details of terrible suffering and then force ourselves to look away.

Trump puts it a little differently. In his speeches, proximity and proximity matter more than logic as he moves from one thought to the next. Trump almost always follows his promise of mass deportation with what may be a sincere or performative expression of regret: “It’s never an easy thing to do, but we have no choice.” And “We have no choice. We don’t want to do this. We have no choice.” This line echoes the way he often phrased the words for which he is most famous: “I have no choice. You’re fired,” from The Apprentice 20 years ago.

In fact, photographic consciousness is above all a matter of choice, of the possibility that seeing something unfathomably terrible can cause a rupture in our personal and collective consciousness. In her book On Photography, published in 1977 a year after Kim Phuc's napalm images in 1972, Susan Sontag recalls the first time she saw photographs of Nazi atrocities.

“Nothing I’ve ever seen in a photograph or in real life has ever hurt me so sharply, so deeply, so instantly,” she wrote. “When I looked at those images, something broke. A limit had been reached.”

At least some of the photographs Sontag saw were undoubtedly taken by the American military, which also demanded that German civilians see the results of the Nazis’ dehumanization of Jews directly through camp tours, newsreels, and other media. A June 18, 1945, photo of the aftermath of the war shows two German children standing in front of a shop window. On the glass is an American poster with images of the death camps, titled “You Should Know About It.” This is further evidence of the American belief that once seen, these barbaric acts could never be forgotten. And this would help lay the foundation for a new, democratic, and peaceful Germany.

Throughout her writings on photography, Sontag has questioned its power to desensitize. Images pierce. Images anesthetize, she wrote. This was half a century ago, before the Internet, cell phone cameras, and the digital fire hose of images that has saturated our consciousness. What Trump does with his imagined trope of the Woman with Two Beautiful Children is another form of anesthesia, helping us imagine the unimaginable so that when we see it, nothing breaks, no limits are reached.

He would have us see in advance what should never be seen. And one day, our children may find themselves in front of these images and ask themselves, “Did no one see that coming?”

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