“Druggies Drug Dealers Rapists and Killers”

Abstract

We analyze the forty-fifth president’s public discourse to characterize the narrative he consistently articulated about unauthorized immigrants. We initially undertook this analysis on behalf of the legal defense of Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA) grantees, to provide scientifically rigorous and replicable evidence that the president’s executive action to rescind the DACA program was a violation of the Equal Protection Clause of the US Constitution. This is a critical discourse analysis of a large sample of his public discourse about immigration, from his first day as a presidential candidate to the day that he attempted to rescind DACA. We inductively analyzed thirteen speeches and 6,963 tweets that revealed an anti-immigrant narrative. We attempt to definitively demonstrate that he articulated racist statements about immigrants and Latinos, hence expressing constitutionally impermissible racial animus. Beyond our formal statement, we offer an explanation based on cognitive science and US history as to why his discourse resonates so well with a sizeable portion of the US electorate.