Trump says Somalis are ‘garbage.’ What does that say about us in Kentucky? | Opinion

When Donald Trump recently called Somali immigrants “garbage” who “contribute nothing” and said he doesn’t “want them in our country,” it sounded like just one more blast of cruelty in a long line. But even from here in Kentucky — far from the Somali neighborhoods of Minneapolis — the way he talks matters. The same habits of mind that let a president label whole communities “garbage” are at work when we in Kentucky talk about people who use drugs, families in poverty, immigrants in Lexington or Louisville, or kids in our “failing” schools.

As a professor of social psychology, I’m helping my students prepare to work in schools, clinics, and public agencies all over the Commonwealth. In my field, we talk about the “fundamental attribution error”: our tendency to explain what people do by what kind of person we think they are, instead of the situations they’re in. If someone is poor, we assume they’re lazy. If a student is struggling, we assume they don’t care. If a neighborhood has crime, we assume the people there are criminals. It’s an easy habit of mind, and all of us make that mistake at times.

Trump’s rhetoric takes this everyday bias and turns it up to 11. He doesn’t just say some immigrants commit crimes. He says they’re “animals,” “poison,” “vermin,” and now “garbage.” That’s not an argument about policy; it’s a claim about essence — about what these people supposedly are deep down. Psychologists call this essentialism: the belief that whole groups share some fixed inner nature that explains everything about them.

Once you decide a group’s “essence” is rotten, the slide into dehumanization is quick. You no longer see people with complicated lives, histories, pressures, and hopes. You see problems that need to be removed. When leaders talk this way, research shows it becomes easier for the rest of us to accept raids, bans, and indifference to suffering. After all, who worries about the rights of “garbage?”

We feel the effects of that way of thinking here, too. When we say, “They just don’t want to work,” about people on SNAP, or “Those parents don’t value education,” about kids in Eastern Kentucky schools, we’re doing a softer version of the same thing: explaining lives from the inside out, as if character tells the whole story. We ignore shuttered factories, lack of child care, underfunded schools, or years of discrimination. We tell ourselves a simple story about bad choices and bad people, and then we congratulate ourselves for our own virtue.

As Kentuckians, we should know better. People in other parts of the country are quick to stereotype us from a few headlines and jokes — to assume they know who we are and what we value. We bristle at that, and rightly so. The question is whether we will extend to others the same benefit we demand for ourselves: the recognition that human beings are more than the worst story someone chooses to tell about them.

Trump’s “garbage” remarks are an extreme case, but they sit on the same spectrum as our casual comments at the dinner table and in the classroom, on the job site and at the Capitol. We cannot control what he says. We can decide how we talk about one another here in Kentucky—whether we lean into the easy blame of “what those people are like,” or whether we insist on seeing neighbors, students, and newcomers as human beings in real situations, worthy of more than contempt.

Dr. Matthew Winslow is a professor at a Kentucky regional institution.

This story was originally published January 6, 2026 at 11:41 AM.