In a week when you thought Donald Trump had reached maximum offensiveness, he proved there’s always a little more disgusting to be had—even if it takes going to white nationalist fantastyland to find it.
What is Trump talking about? He’s going back to a story he told during the campaign.
After the war, Pershing served as governor of the heavily Muslim Moro Province between 1909 and 1913. This period was notable for its continuing insurgencies.
"They were having terrorism problems, just like we do," Trump said, according to an account in the Washington Post. "And he caught 50 terrorists who did tremendous damage and killed many people. And he took the 50 terrorists, and he took 50 men and he dipped 50 bullets in pigs’ blood — you heard that, right? He took 50 bullets, and he dipped them in pigs’ blood. And he had his men load his rifles, and he lined up the 50 people, and they shot 49 of those people. And the 50th person, he said: You go back to your people, and you tell them what happened. And for 25 years, there wasn’t a problem. Okay? Twenty-five years, there wasn’t a problem."
Twenty-five years. Thirty-five years. It doesn’t really matter because the whole damn story is a lie. It never happened. Similar stories have been told about other military leaders, and though details vary, the thing they all seem to have in common is that they’re not true. But Trump’s hate for people not like him? That’s all too real.
No matter how many times Trump repeats this story, it’s not going to be any less stupid, any less bigoted, any less a reflection of his own brutality and ignorance.
The desire for simplistic solutions to complex problems has spawned several widely-circulated notions that seek to transform a fight against terrorism to the easily-manageable level of a horror film or a comic strip. One popular notion is the concept that a pig is to a Muslim as a crucifix is to a vampire: simply arm yourself with a porker, and you can use it to render even the most fanatical terrorist helpless, sending him cowering in fear lest he come into contact with anything porcine.
Trump already knows the story is a lie. It was debunked repeatedly during the campaign, but that didn’t stop Trump from bringing it up again and again.
He’s not trying to present an actual solution. He’s just trying to express his vile hatred—he doesn’t just want people dead, he wants them desecrated. That Trump keeps repeating this story says far more about him than it does about Muslims.