Twenty-one kindergartners stood on a stage in St. Paul, Minnesota, in caps and gowns, singing the song five-year-olds sing when they’ve survived their first year of school. Most of the girls wore hijabs. Their families sat with phones raised, doing what families do at that age and that milestone: recording proof that their child made it.

The President of the United States watched that video and found the offense. Not the singing. Not the caps and gowns. The hijabs.

He didn’t bother adding commentary. He didn’t need to. He reposted the clip along with a stranger’s caption that did the ugly work for him: “Every girl is in a hijab… in kindergarten.” No policy argument, no curriculum complaint, nothing but the bare observation that Muslim children exist in an American public school, broadcast to millions as though it were evidence of a crime.

His audience treated it like one.

The comment section under the President’s own post filled with adults demanding five-year-olds be deported and the cloth on their heads outlawed. Grown men and women, cheered on by the most powerful man alive, gathered to jeer at children for graduating kindergarten while Muslim. Not a metaphor. Not hyperbole. It happened today, in daylight, under his name.

And it isn’t new. In December this same President called Somali immigrants “garbage” in a cabinet meeting and said their homeland “stinks.” He told reporters he didn’t want them here. He posted that they should be sent back to wherever they came from. Congresswoman Ilhan Omar, who represents more Somali Americans than any other district in the country, warned that his words land as real consequences on people who share her identity. She was right then. She is right again, watching the same account find a new set of children to aim at.

Deport all of them. Can fit more per plane when they are little like that.

It’s an invasion of an invasive species

What you wanna be when you grow up? I wanna be a terrorist.

🤮🤮🤮

Actual comments from Our fellow americans

I am done pretending there is a version of this that deserves patience. Cato didn’t need Caesar’s memoir to know what Caesar was. Voltaire didn’t wait for the inquisitor to explain himself before calling out cruelty for what it was. I don’t owe Donald Trump or his replies the courtesy of inventing a better motive than the one on display. There isn’t one.

A five-year-old in a graduation gown is not a threat to anyone. She is a child who learned to read this year. Anyone who looks at that image and sees an enemy is not confused. He is looking for permission to hate, and the President just handed it to him, stapled to the seal of his office.

This was not a debate about immigration policy. This was not a disagreement over school curriculum. This was a sitting President and an army of strangers deciding that a small girl’s faith made her a fair target for public humiliation, and doing it with the giddy, high-fiving energy of men who finally found someone smaller than themselves to hit. There is no reading of “concerns about assimilation” that gets you from a graduation video to “deport the kindergartner.” You don’t stumble into that position. You have to want it.

And they wanted it badly enough to say so in public, under their own names, replying directly to the President of the United States.

Nobody made Trump repost that clip. Nobody made his followers write what they wrote. He chose it the way a bully chooses to shove the smallest kid on the playground, and his followers chose their replies the way a mob chooses its next target: eagerly, and together, and proud of themselves for it.

A country doesn’t reveal its character in how it treats the powerful. It reveals it in how casually the powerful are allowed to humiliate the weakest people in the room, and in how many bystanders laugh along instead of putting a stop to it. Today that test had a stage, caps and gowns, and twenty-one children who did nothing but graduate and sing. And MAGA (again) exposed themselves as cowards following an ignorant thug attacking those who can’t fight back.

Twenty-one kids got their kindergarten diplomas today. The president of the United States and thousands of adults mocked those children because they believe superiority is their American birthright.

I don’t have a policy prescription for how to talk MAGA out of attacking children, much less laughing about it.

That doesn’t mean I don’t have an idea for next steps though.

Here is what I think would make good sense: Every one of these bullies, from Trump to the most pathetic of his adherents, can fuck all the way off.