But aren't we all animals?

Criticism of the President's recent remarks about the MS-13 gang sometimes sounds like an exercise in deliberate misinterpretation. Contextually, it was obvious that Trump had the Salvadoran gang and others like it in mind when he said that some people entering the country illegally were "animals." Yet I've just read Cynthia Tucker's column condemning the "animals" comment and MS-13 is never mentioned. Instead, Tucker describes Trump as pandering to his reactionary white base with unwarranted generalizations intended to dehumanize Latin immigrants as a whole. Could Trump have spared himself these attacks by speaking more carefully, e.g. by stating specifically that gang members were animals?  I doubt it, since his real offense, as a white man, was to describe any non-white person as an animal. Hillary Clinton faced similar criticism, and has never been forgiven in some quarters, for describing some black men as "superpredators." I doubt either person would be condemned as strongly for saying that the Sicilian or Russian mafia were animals, or even that some Sicilians or Russians were animals. I suppose that some people will object to the supposed dehumanization of anyone, regardless of race, especially if it's phrased as a generalization that violates the presumption of abstract people's innocence, and I suppose it might be taboo among some ethnic groups even to describe each other as animals, but the hubbub over Trump's remarks pretty much boils down  to his being white and the President. I hope those details don't disqualify him from condemning criminal gangs, foreign and domestic -- and perhaps he should turn his attention to the latter more often -- and I definitely hope that people in general don't feel inhibited from describing criminal gangs as they deserve out of an empathetic humanity the gangs do not reciprocate.