The news media have identified a new group of victims being harmed by Donald Trump’s unconventional campaign for president: the children.
The New York Times on Thursday published an article asking, “How do you talk to your children about Donald Trump?”
“For some children, Mr. Trump’s message has filtered down in extremely upsetting, possibly dangerous, ways,” the story said. “Social media has buzzed with parents relaying their children’s fears that they or their friends would be deported, walled in or walled out if Mr. Trump were to become president.”
Trump’s penchant for speaking off the cuff, often without any apparent concern as to whom he might offend, has enthralled his supporters and enraged his critics. He has called for building a wall on the U.S.-Mexico border and for temporarily banning foreign Muslims from entering the country.
Most recently, Trump, responding to taunts from his GOP rival Marco Rubio, alluded to his penis size during a debate last week. The rhetoric has, according to media accounts, impacted the lives of children across the U.S.
During an interview Wednesday on MSNBC, ABC News commentator Cokie Roberts asked Trump if he was “proud” that “there have been incidents of children, white children, pointing to their darker skinned classmates and saying, ‘you’ll be deported when Donald Trump is president.'”
Washington Post columnist Petula Dvorak bemoaned the future of American civilization in light of what children are hearing. “Given what some of our children are learning from [Trump],” she wrote Monday, “it may take an entire generation to recover from the hateful rhetoric he has aimed at immigrants, Muslims and Blacks Lives Matter protesters.”
There have been some first-person accounts on social media of school-aged children mimicking Trump’s language about deporting illegal immigrants in classes and at school events.
But only one has been corroborated by news outlets to be directly tied to the candidate. Students at an Indiana high school last week reportedly chanted “build a wall” while waving a poster of Trump’s face at a basketball game last week.
“Muslim children throughout the country are expressing fear amid fiery campaign rhetoric, say therapists and community leaders,” said a report in the Chicago Tribune.
The story later admits that “bullying of Muslim children is not new.”
