I’m going to try to summon the patience that wasn’t in me last night on the off chance there’s someone out there who sincerely imagines the context here to be exculpatory. 
This is a textbook case of how dehumanizing and racist rhetoric works. The question references a hypothetical MS-13 member. Trump immediately pivots to a vaguer “people trying to come into the country” who we’re “taking out.”
The point of that move is precisely to conflate groups: “people trying to come in” —> gang members —> “not people, animals.” Spend five minutes on any racist message board and you’ll find a dozen instances of the trope.
There’s always some real crime by some specific member of a disfavored group that gets invoked to rationalize the move to talk about the more nebulous “they” who are animals and savages. But the specific case is always a pretext for indulging the generalization.
But, of course, MS-13 isn’t representative of either the “people trying to come in” or the people being “taken out.” The point of the dehumanizing language is to reassure you it’s not necessary to think about who those people actually are.
Finally, even if we pretend the point here ISN’T precisely to blur the distinction between MS-13 and “people trying to come in”—even if we pretend he’s really JUST talking about MS-13 members, let’s note that the equation of crime with animality here is selective.
On the occasions Trump finds time in his busy schedule to condemn murderers who aren’t brown, the focus is typically on the act, rather on what biological category it puts the perpetrator in.
When a white supremacist murdered Heather Heyer in Charlottesville, we were enjoined to remember that there were “very fine people” on his side. It’s horror at brown criminals that gets expressed in language like “not even people, but animals.”
When Rob Porter is very credibly accused of beating up women he’s dated, we need to pause and show empathy and consider how it may ruin a good person’s life if the charges are false.
But those nebulous “people trying to come into the country” don’t require that sort of individualized consideration. We can casually talk about “bad people” and then dispense with the pretense of troubling ourselves about their humanity at all.
Last thing: What’s the point of that specific question? The “threshhold” the sheriff posing it finds so burdensome? He’s talking about ICE being concerned with specific serious criminal acts rather than the sheriff’s belief someone is associated with a gang.
The point of Trump’s response is that we don’t need to fussily concern ourselves with bad ACTS when we know we’re dealing with “bad people,” and on second thought, indeed, not even really people at all.
The point of is dehumanization & deindividualization at multiple levels. Don’t worry about showing criminal conduct by a particular individual, we know he’s one of the bad people. Don’t bother yourself about distinctions between that criminal group & “people trying to come in.”
Such nice distinctions are for very fine human white supremacists and square-jawed domestic abusers with ivy league credentials. About animal herds, we can freely generalize.
There’s your context. Tell me again how unfair it is to be disgusted.
OK, one more: The question Trump was asked wasn’t “about” MS-13. The questioner made one offhand hypothetical reference to MS-13 in a much longer question that was “about” the standard for referring people detained by law enforcement to ICE.
The upshot, again, was: Isn’t it dumb that I can only pass these guys to ICE if they meet the “threshold” of being implicated in a specific semi-serious crime? The idea that Trump's response was restricted to one throwaway sentence in that very long question is just bizarre.
Now, I realize it’s not a given that whatever subsequently came out of Trump’s mouth was logically responsive to the actual question asked. But *assuming that it was*, it makes no sense to interpret it as a narrow assertion about MS-13 being bad guys.
The reading of Trump’s rant that makes it responsive to the actual question is: Yes, it’s foolish to require that sort of particularized suspicion—that “threshold”—because our presumption should be that we’re dealing with “animals.”
TL;DR 1/2: Reading Trump as narrowly condeming MS-13 requires both assuming he was free associating on one sentence rather than answering the question, and ignoring how eliminationist rhetoric always functions.
TL;DR 2/2: Even on that very implausible reading, there’s a conspicuous & ugly pattern to the condemnation of crime Trump chooses to express by denying the humanity of the perpetrator.
