Welcome to The Dig, a podcast from Jacobin Magazine.

I'm Daniel Denver, and I'm broadcasting from AS-220 in Providence, Rhode Island.

The vicious depravity of Donald Trump's fear-mongering, xenophobic, and anti-Muslim politics are in full swing.

The man, who is most certainly but serially our president, has barred people from seven Muslim-majority countries, Iran, Iraq, Libya, Somalia, Sudan, Syria, and Yemen,

including, to an unclear and ultimately walk-back degree, lawful permanent residence,

from entering the United

States for 90 days, all refugees are barred for 120 days, and refugees from Syria are barred

indefinitely. What's gotten less attention, but is also quite serious, is that Trump slashed

the overall number of refugees slated to be admitted this year by more than half.

Meanwhile, on the racist scapegoating of Mexicans' front,

he has moved to construct more border wall,

widen the definition of which undocumented immigrants should be prioritized for deportation,

and cut federal funding to localities which

refuse to let their police departments cooperate with deportations, though it is unclear to what

extent such cuts will be legally possible. The Muslim ban, notably, does not apply to many Muslim

majority countries where the governments are powerful U.S. allies, including

Saudi Arabia, a U.S.-backed Salafist oil oligarch regime that pushes its violent and fundamentalist

creed around the world. By contrast, according to the Libertarian Cato Institute, foreigners from

those seven banned nations have killed zero Americans in terrorist attacks on U.S. soil between 1975 and the end of 2015.

This is far-right hateful political theater with cruel political and human consequences,

and it's also the extreme outcome of anti-immigrant, anti-Muslim, and militarist policies pursued

for years by the bipartisan political establishment.

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