Donald Trump's tax reform roundtable talk in West Virginia was not about taxes. White House staff and congressional Republicans want Trump on the stump to talk about the tax cuts law, since that's pretty much all they have to run on this midterm. Trump, however, is bored by that script so on Thursday he literally tossed it aside. "This was going to be my remarks—it would have taken about two minutes, but what the hell—that would have been a little boring," he said, throwing the remarks aside. "I'm reading off the first paragraph, I said, 'This is boring.' Come on. We have to tell it like it is."
Telling like it is, in Trumpese, means running through the litany of dark and disturbing things he has made up in his dark and disturbed imagination, a tirade of his favorite racist conspiracy theories. He started back at day one of his campaign—"Remember my opening remarks at Trump Tower when I opened … Everybody said, 'Oh, he was so tough,' and I used the word 'rape.'" That gave him the segue into his new obsession, the "caravan" of Central American refugees seeking safety in Mexico.
"And yesterday, it came out where, this journey coming up, women are raped at levels that nobody has ever seen before." That story did not come out, because it's not happening. "You guys heard of a case?" one of the group's organizers Rodrigo Abeja asked reporters in Matías Romero, Mexico. "Neither have we." The group is organized as a caravan, Eric L. Olson, the deputy director of the Latin American program at the Woodrow Wilson Center in Washington, explained, expressly "to protect themselves from abuse from Mexican authorities and criminal groups and unscrupulous people. …No criminal is so stupid and do something like that while everyone's eyes are trained on them."
He also aired his sick fantasies about the gang MS-13 and how the gang members cut people up with knives, like innocent young girls: "Their parents never see 'em again. They're cut up." He said that his administration was cracking down but at the same time, because Democrats that's "the kind of stuff and crap that we're allowing into our country, and we can't do it." He went on with "We have very weak laws because of the Democrats. We had very, very weak laws. We have the worst laws—you ever think catch-and-release, which we're terminating very quickly." That's not a law. It's a practice in which detained immigrants are allowed to go until they have their day in court.
The attacks on immigrants continued, with Trump making more shit up. On the Manhattan truck attack suspect: "He brought a lot of people with him. They say 22 people. Twenty-two people. So this guy, because he's here, now can get the mother and the father and the grandmother and the cousins and the brothers and the sisters and the aunts and the uncles." They say. No one but Trump says because as a permanent resident, the suspect Sayfullo Saipov could not bring in extended family. There's no evidence he did so.
And, of course, all those illegals illegally voting in the United States. "In many places, like California, the same person votes many times. You probably heard about that. They always like to say, 'Oh, that's a conspiracy theory.' Not a conspiracy theory, folks. Millions and millions of people, and it's very hard because the state guards their records." Yeah. No. Just no. He lost the popular vote, by millions, because millions of Americans voted against him.
Trump proved again that there is no way the facts and reality will overcome his racism and what it leads him to believe to be true. So, have fun with that Republicans. He's never going to follow your script.
