The Exploitation of “Beautiful Kate”: How Donald Trump and his conservative allies twisted the facts of a deadly San Francisco shooting to stoke America’s xenophobia.
Jeremy Stahl on Slate looks at how President Trump turned Kate Steinle’s tragic death in San Francisco into a piece of propaganda, and how the president’s lies about immigration have become our national agenda:
For Trump, the death of Kate Steinle was a branding opportunity—a chance to mark himself as the candidate who’d stood up to a supposed immigrant scourge, and to advertise to voters that he’d been right about an issue that everyone else was too “politically correct” to talk about. Steinle’s death also gave Trump an opening to stoke the fears of primary voters. If “beautiful Kate in San Francisco”—a young, innocent white woman—could be murdered in cold blood by a Mexican “animal,” so could any young, innocent white woman in any town in the United States.
KJ