A death. A funeral. And the Trump Rally Down the Block.

Let’s go. Happy Monday.

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by Andrew Egger

Springfield, Ohio
They buried Pierre Damas Bel on Saturday. That night, Donald Trump came to town to take a victory lap over the policies that killed him.

It’s been a little more than a month since Bel, a 20-year-old Haitian who arrived legally in the United States as a high school student in 2024, threw himself under a truck on the highway, a death of despair after his legal status was revoked by the Trump administration this summer. Among the hundreds of people gathered to mourn Saturday at St. John Missionary Baptist Church in Springfield, the grief was still raw and immediate.

Banners on the church walls proclaimed scriptural messages of comfort: “Jehovah Shammah: The Lord is always present. Jehovah Rophe: The Lord heals.” As family members wept and sobbed, ministers asked God, in English and Haitian Creole, for consolation in the midst of grief.

“You are near to those who are brokenhearted. We pray that you will come near to us today,” prayed Pastor Ernie Brown of St. John. “When questions have no answers, give them the strength to confide to you what we cannot understand. »

Many unanswered questions hung over Bel’s funeral. Here are two. How could a country offer such a bright future to a young man like him, only to then shatter that future, and him too, by suddenly snatching it away? And how could the president who made this possible show his face on the same day, a few miles away, not only to defend this change, but also to benefit from it?

Hours later, 25 miles away in the Dayton suburb of Vandalia, Trump kicked the football into gear. “It’s in honor of Springfield, Ohio,” he said, “a quaint little town of 32,000 people where they took in 35,000 people and put them in Springfield, and it didn’t work very well. And they were kicked out.”

If there is one child the American immigration system is aimed at, it is Pierre Damas Bel. For him, America was not just a refuge from his broken homeland, Haiti. It was a place where he seemed destined to flourish.

Speakers recalled how Bel had distinguished himself in school, athletics, socially, in junior ROTC and at work. He had gone to the local University of Wittenberg to play football on a scholarship; he intended to study neuroscience and hoped to one day open a hospital in Haiti.

Bel couldn’t have known it, but his dream had begun to fade the very year he arrived — the year Republicans chose Springfield’s Haitians as national scapegoats for Joe Biden’s immigration excesses, the year they became the targets of a million racist political lies: “They eat dogs,” Trump yelled during a debate. “They eat cats.”

This summer, the hammer fell. The Supreme Court ruled that it could not really know that Trump’s attempt to deport the Haitians was motivated by racism, so who were the judges to make a fuss? Thus the way was clear for Trump to transform Haitian recipients of U.S. TPS into a law-abiding community of integration that became a community of illegal immigrants, unable to work, obtain a driver’s license, or otherwise participate in society; systematically chained with surveillance bracelets, under immediate threat of being dragged into an ICE van and deported.

Perhaps the most remarkable and heartbreaking thing about Bel’s story is this: He kept his faith in America almost to the end. Unable to play football at Wittenberg because of his ankle monitor, he enrolled at a nearby public school, Wright State.

According to his family, the latest humiliation occurred at Wright State’s ROTC program. Because he was not a U.S. citizen, Bel was not eligible to become an ROTC cadet; he participated in the program on an optional basis.

Perhaps at first he saw it as a distinction without a difference. But then came the news that he, alone among his classmates, could not receive an ROTC uniform. He had embraced America; there was no mistaking the signs that America wasn’t kissing him back.

He wanted to wear the fabric of the country. The country instead put an ankle monitor on him. A few days later, he threw himself under a truck.

None of this was necessary. “Our dear friend and brother may have died by suicide,” Guerline Jozef, executive director of the Haitian Bridge Alliance, said at the funeral. “But he was killed by the system.”

What do local Republicans think of all this? In theory, they are the ones who benefit from Trump’s policy towards the Haitians. But many don’t seem particularly enthusiastic about the whole complicated affair. There is an ambivalence, a sense of unease about this thing, even among some otherwise pot-engaged Trump fans.

I found out later Saturday, in Vandalia, where Trump was scheduled to make his final red-state rally before next month’s midterm elections. Talking to MAGA voters outside in line, I was struck by how few of them were willing to wholeheartedly support the depersonalization of Haitians.

When I asked Dayton resident Joe Brafford what he considered Trump’s biggest accomplishment so far, he didn’t hesitate: “I like the fact that he closed the border.” » But when it came to local Haitians, he was much more conflicted. “I wouldn’t have granted them (temporary protected status) in the first place,” he said. “I think it was a mistake, but Biden gave them that status, and they have that status. So I don’t know how you can, in good conscience, expel them all. . . . It really is a dilemma.

“I worked in construction for many years and I had a crew of Mexican workers. A lot of them were illegal,” said David Snavely, who was standing nearby. “Great guys. I mean, they were a great team. I didn’t care about their status. All I cared about, none of them were bad people. They worked their hearts out. In fact, they were better workers than some of the guys on the team.”

“I feel sorry for the people who have been here a long time and are productive,” Sharon Hardwick said. “But at the same time, they’ve already stayed too long. And I think the American economic system could fail if we keep all these people in our country and try to pay for whatever the Democrats want to pay for.”

Later, watching the rally unfold before Trump arrived, I wondered if this sense of discomfort explained why, despite the issue’s enormous local importance, most speakers skirted around it. Senators Jon Husted and Bernie Moreno, gubernatorial candidate Vivek Ramaswamy, Ohio Secretary of State Frank LaRose, Representative Mike Turner, state party chairman Alex Triantafilou — all came and went without a single mention, positive or negative, of local Haitians.

And why not? These men were there, before the midterm elections, to channel the crowd’s big, simple emotions: loyalty to Trump, enthusiasm for America’s so-called “golden age,” and fear of the communist takeover they claimed Democrats wanted to bring about. Many in the crowd may have wanted their Haitian neighbors to disappear, but they didn’t want to have to think about it too much. It’s easier to ignore all the pain down the road than to confront the role you played in it.

But then along came Trump, who had no such qualms. Far from dodging the question, the president delved into the subject, devoting his customary reading of the immigrant panic poem “The Serpent” to the residents of Springfield.

“Springfield, Ohio, do you know this story? It’s a very sad story,” Trump said. Springfield, he insisted, was a “beautiful” and “idyllic” small town – “that’s a word they use in the great scriptures: ‘idyllic’” – until these Haitians came.

“It was an idyllic place. Wasis the best word. Not anymore, but it will be soon. They are all taken back to their country.

This, too, was spiritual leadership, although of a very different kind than I had seen at St. John. Trump spoke with the scornful confidence of a decade of experience at MAGA rallies — secure in the knowledge that a crowd never loves him more than when he gives it permission to indulge in a little communal vice. And he was right. Whatever scruples, whatever discomfort they may have felt, the crowd now abandoned them. They smiled, laughed and sang: “Expel! Expel! Expel!»

Trump says they will all go back. For the friends and family of Pierre Damas Bel, the future is murky; It remains to be seen whether they will be able to stay and for how long. But they won’t all I will go back. They buried Pierre Damas Bel on Saturday. It’s here to stay.

Donate to the Haitian Support Center.

For those of us trying to learn about AI, I recommend an interview with Hanna Rosin in the Atlantic with Nobel Prize winner in physics Geoffrey Hinton, the “godfather of AI”. Hinton resigned from Google in May 2023 to speak out about the risks of AI.

Some excerpts:

The main message I got from (the Hugging Face incident) was that these things that people were saying were all science fiction and that these things would never conspire, and that they would always do exactly what we wanted – as we feared, it all made no sense. These things are very intelligent. They are becoming more and more intelligent. They escape confinement. They plot among themselves. They took over parts of OpenAI itself without OpenAI knowing. So they are already very dangerous, and they become even more dangerous as we make them more intelligent. . . .

AI poses many different risks. So there’s a whole bunch of risks associated with bad agents deliberately doing bad things with them. There are many risks associated with simple negligence. And then there is another set of risks, related to the AI ​​support itself. And for a long time, people have been saying that the risk of AI taking over itself is just science fiction. Well, it turns out that’s not the case.

Read the whole thing.

–William Kristol