Trump's 'Bumfights For Migrants' Plan Exposes The Toxic Rot Of MAGA Nativism
Just because anti-immigration ideas can be made to poll well doesn't mean Democrats should assume the country is overrun by hatred.
One of the most indelible and convoluted moments in twenty-first century popular culture occurred in 2006, courtesy of the Oprah Winfrey protege Dr. Phil McGraw.
On the December 6 episode of his eponymous talk show, Dr. Phil was scheduled to interview Ty Beeson, a creator of the direct-to-video spectacle Bumfights, wherein opportunistic filmmakers paid homeless people to assault and otherwise harm one another on camera.
Perhaps because he sensed a sandbagging, or perhaps because he was in on the gimmick, Beeson sent an impersonator in his place, and had him dress like Dr. Phil, cue-ball dome and all. His instincts (or “instincts”) were correct. After hyping the interview, and airing Beeson’s promotional footage, Dr. Phil had an abrupt change of heart.
“Stop the tape. I don’t want to talk to you,” McGraw told Beeson. “That’s despicable.”
“If you think I exploit people,” Beeson replied, “every time you bring a guest on to this show, you exploit them, and spread whatever problems they have to the whole world.”
A fair point, but hardly a winning one. Whether the altercation was staged or not, Dr. Phil occupied the moral high ground in the minds of the audience. Unlike trashy TV talk shows, Bumfights dispensed with the pretense that people with problems are humans with inherent dignity. Dr. Phil might’ve seen dollar signs whenever some sad sack agreed to humiliate himself on live television, but he at least cloaked his cynicism in the guise of a higher purpose: his guests could better themselves, his viewers could attain higher levels of compassion.
Bumfights had no time for such cloying artifice. It reveled in poor people’s suffering and social alienation. Of course its creators were villains, and of course most people who watched the exchange sided with the person who treated Bumfights as beneath contempt.
Today, Dr. Phil is a supporter of Donald Trump. He no longer hosts his network television program, but he did lob Trump some softball questions on his internet show, Dr. Phil Primetime, including a pained and failed effort to get Trump to disclaim both his antipathy to immigrants, and his lusty vindictiveness.
Well, Donald Trump isn’t feeling Dr. Phil’s yearning for magnanimity and immigration.
During a speech to right-wing Christians in Philadelphia on Saturday, Trump channeled Dr. Phil’s old nemesis Ty Beeson: “Did anyone ever hear of [Ultimate Fighting Championship President] Dana White?” Trump asked. “I said, ‘Dana, I have an idea. Why don’t you set up a migrant league of fighters and have your regular league of fighters, and then you have the champion of your league—these are the greatest fighters in the world—fight the champion of the migrants.’ I think the migrant guy might win; that’s how tough they are.”
If forcing migrants facing expulsion to fistfight champion martial artists were a winning idea, surely Trump and White could get it done. But according to Trump, White “didn’t like that idea too much.” White himself was at pains to insist that Trump was merely joking. And Dr. Phil, once so righteously appalled by the idea of luring vulnerable people into pit fights, has disappeared. My requests for comment went unanswered.
THE NATIVISTS ARE RESTLESS
Democrats surely agree this is grotesque, but I think we’re unlikely to see them make a big spectacle over Trump’s sadism.