The cameras cut, but the damage didn’t. In the hallway, staffers rehearsed sanitized talking points while replaying the raw version in their minds: a president who turned a policy dispute into a condemnation of a people, collapsing millions into a single, suspect identity.
On TV, pundits debated whether it was “just words,” as if words hadn’t always been the first swing of the hammer before laws, violence, and exclusion followed.
In living rooms and break rooms, people whose families came from that maligned homeland braced for the shift they knew would come—the extra stare, the harsher joke, the quiet decision not to hire, to trust, to care. Some supporters insisted it was necessary honesty. But history rarely remembers the spin; it remembers who got hurt. A country can survive a bad speech. The question is whether it survives what that speech makes some people feel permitted to do.
