But the Trump team doesn’t appear to want to participate in these debates in good faith. Trump has a very clear anti-human rights agenda, and the Trump administration has been actively attempting to undermine human rights at home and abroad. The administration has worked to roll back protections for LGBTQ individuals. It has attacked the reproductive rights of women. It has treated – and spoken about – migrants and refugees as less than human. It is trying to revoke protections for those who want to apply for asylum in the US. It launches dangerous attacks on the media and free speech. Trump personally defends the North Korean dictator Kim Jong-un’s brutal repression. The list goes on and on and on.
What’s more, the Trump administration wants to gaslight Americans into believing that this new commission is necessary because the fight to expand rights protections somehow gives cover to other countries to abuse the language of human rights to defend their repression. Pompeo speciously said: “Rights claims are often aimed more at rewarding interest groups and dividing humanity into subgroups. Oppressive regimes like Iran and Cuba have taken advantage of this cacophonous call for ‘rights’, even pretending to be avatars of freedom.” You read that right: the secretary of state is blaming people who work to protect human rights for supposedly helping authoritarian regimes.
And this is the Orwellian goal of the Trump administration. They want everyone to believe that what they are doing is in support of laudable goals – freedom, democracy, security, choose your own lofty noun. They make racist and antisemitic
comments against others while claiming that they are somehow fighting antisemitism and defending Israel. They tear away children from their parents and place them in cages and claim that it is all a deterrent to protect those same migrants from the dangers of the journey to the United States.
