America came of age with the development of photography, and images of suffering have galvanized political ideas and sentiment. If you can see them. , Donald Trump seems to be talking in some version of Tamarian, a language first heard more than 30 years ago in a 1991 episode of “Star Trek: The Next Generation.
Trump is referencing a hypothetical image of something that hasn’t yet happened, and encouraging Americans to harden their hearts against its emotional power. He is extending his frequent dehumanization of immigrants — as animals and criminals — into what might be called the photographic conscience, the visceral power of images to galvanize public sentiment and reorder the priorities of political life.
of corpses in a field after the Battle of Gettysburg is an early American expression of the idea: “Such a picture conveys a useful moral. … Here are the dreadful details! Let them aid in preventing such another calamity falling upon the nation.” “Nothing I have seen — in photographs or in real life — ever cut me as sharply, deeply, instantaneously,” she wrote. “When I looked at these images, something broke. Some limit had been reached.”