Donald Trump did his best on Thursday to whip up fear about impoverished migrants fleeing violence in their home countries, but he didn’t do much to offer answers, even for the crisis he’s inventing. And immigration is an invented crisis: the numbers, from border crossings to the number of undocumented immigrants to crime to the likely outcome of the specific caravan Trump is so busy demonizing, are simply not at crisis or even out-of-the-ordinary levels.
Yet Trump is pretending that asylum-seeking migrants who are currently hundreds of miles away and mostly traveling on foot are likely to storm the border en masse and throw rocks at troops. “They want to throw rocks at our military, our military fights back,” Trump blustered. “We’re going to consider—and I told them consider it a rifle.” Except a rock isn’t a rifle … and people arriving to ask for legal asylum aren’t likely to throw rocks, especially when many of them have their young children with them.
In addition to calling for heavily armed troops to shoot at impoverished people bearing imaginary rocks, Trump said he plans to send 15,000 troops, as many as are in Afghanistan and a number that seems to have taken the military by surprise. And, of course, he lied. He lied about how many immigrants fail to show up in immigration court, he mysteriously failed to mention that his favored immigration bills can’t even get all the Republican votes they need, he lied about how fentanyl enters the U.S., and more.
But the headline has to be that Trump is so determined to frighten U.S. voters that he’s pretending the families heading for the border are violent, rock-throwing invaders who should be shot by a deployment of as many troops as the U.S. has in Afghanistan. Because that is horrifying even by Trump standards.
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