Before Donald Trump opened his mouth in Phoenix on Wednesday, the whole race seemed poised for a change. For weeks, both Trump and his surrogates had been turning over aspects of his signature immigration issue, converting what had been clear—wrong, but clear—positions into big walls of “huh?” It wasn’t just the word “softening” that crept into Trump’s vocabulary, the term “humane” was showing up with regularity, and Trump gave more than one speech in which he professed to be concerned about the fate of immigrant families and “good people” who had been here for a long time.
With Trump’s publicity stunt in Mexico still fresh (and the knowledge that Trump had lied about the actual content of the conversation only starting to trickle out) everything was on the edge. He seemed ready, if not for an actual pivot into reason, then at least for a re-positioning that would allow hardcore supporters to believe he was still on their side while changing the terminology enough to convince undecided voters to reconcile their Trump fears.
That’s not what happened.
Instead, Donald Trump delivered ...
a full-throated rant designed to whip up his base.
An ...
… aggressively tough speech on immigration buried the notion that he planned to pivot away from the posture that got him the Republican nomination to a gentler position tailored for more moderate general election voters, Republicans included.
And when it comes down to it …
the single most important speech of his presidential campaign … an angry affirmation of the message that won him the Republican nomination: We are going to build a wall along our southern border, and Mexico is going to pay for it.
It was a speech that drew a line—a lily white line—between immigrants and the Trump supporters in the room. It was a speech about US vs. THEM. It wasn’t just about deporting immigrants. It was about defining them as a dangerous, despicable other. It was a speech that didn’t just “whip up” the base, it shook the political foundations of the country.
In a speech riddled with exaggerations and flat-out lies, Donald Trump embraced every conspiracy theory of the white nationalist alt-right, and rolled them together into a mega-conspiracy; one in which immigrants are to be feared, shunned, and hunted down. One in which his political opponents are not just weaklings and traitors, but actually complicit in “countless” murders and subject to the efficient disposal awaiting all those who fail to meet the new standards of the Fatherland. One in which the current record low number of people crossing the border is actually a record high, and the low crime rate of immigrants is a plague on the land.
One in which the foundering middle class isn’t being battered by management and corporations that increasingly pocket every increase in profit, but by immigrant workers taking jobs at the very bottom of the ladder.
At a time when President Obama is actually in conflict with immigrant groups over a record level of detainees and deportments, Trump painted the president as a “weak and foolish” enabler who opened the jail cells of criminal immigrants in full knowledge that they planned to kill.
And even though the Homeland Security Act of 2002 took what little immigration authority the State Department had ever had and placed it within the DHS, Trump was quick to credit Hillary Clinton as a co-conspirator in this plan to throw rabid immigrants at good Americans.
This led to a segment of the speech which Trump might have labeled “Scary Immigrant Stories for White People,” including this little tale of terror.
Also among the victims of the Obama-Clinton open borders policy was Grant Ronnebeck, a 21-year-old convenience store clerk and a really good guy from Mesa, Arizona. A lot of you have known about Grant.
He was murdered by an illegal immigrant gang member previously convicted of burglary, who had also been released from federal custody, and they knew it was going to happen again.
This astoundingly encapsulates so many lies, that it’s worth diagramming like grammar in a middle school English class.
- Clinton has nothing to do with the current immigration policy.
- There is no “open borders policy.” Not from Obama, not from Clinton. Not from anyone.
- How many compliments would Donald Trump have paid a convenience store clerk who was inconveniently killed by a citizen?
- “They knew it was going to happen again.” Who is they? Would that be the Maricopa County Attorney's Office, who made a plea deal with Ronnebeck’s killer and released him on bond after he was picked up for burglary? Or is “they” President Obama, Hillary Clinton and … whoever else Donald Trump feels is involved in turning criminals free.
- How did they know it was going to happen again? Were “they” actually planning for the death of a convenience store clerk?
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It’s not just that these two brief paragraphs are laden with lies and distortions. It’s that these two paragraphs are representative of the whole speech. Hillary Clinton hasn’t promised Social Security to undocumented workers. She hasn’t called for 600,000 refugees from Syria. Even the program that Trump called out as being effective—the Secure Communities program—is mostly notable for being particularly ineffective.
If you set out to write a speech in which every word was a lie, you’d have to work hard to best Trump’s accomplishment.
But it’s not just the purposeful distortion and error that pervades the report. It’s what Trump does with those untruths. Undocumented workers aren’t ebbing even as opportunities at the bottom of the economy weaken, they’re a record-setting “flood” of invaders threatening each of of us individually and our existence as a country.
Once his supporters have accepted that a slackening trickle of people looking to improve their lives is actually a swelling horde of murderous inhumans … all bets are off. Along with all decency. And all laws.
Once Trump has equated immigrants and monsters, he can roar his support for Operation Wetback, a program that deported American citizens as well as immigrants, and which with caused hundreds of deaths. He can sneeringly declare that he’s going to triple the size of his deportation force. He can threaten to set the police free of restraints so that “day one, my first hour in office, those people are gone.”
Where are they gone?
And you can call it deported if you want. The press doesn't like that term. You can call it whatever the hell you want. They're gone.
Gone where? Wherever.
Within ICE I am going to create a new special deportation task force focused on identifying and quickly removing the most dangerous criminal illegal immigrants in America who have evaded justice just like Hillary Clinton has evaded justice, OK?
Maybe they'll be able to deport her.
Maybe they’ll deport your neighbor. Maybe they’ll deport your daughter. Maybe they’ll deport anyone who they don’t like.
And hey, when I say deport, I just mean they’ll be gone.
