Fear the raped.
Eleven lifetimes ago, in June of 2015, Donald Trump gave a speech letting everybody know that he was running for president. Barely two minutes into his speech, as you no doubt remember, he started in on the Mexicans.
"When Mexico sends its people, they’re not sending their best. (...) They’re bringing drugs. They’re bringing crime. They’re rapists. And some, I assume, are good people," he said.
Trump assumed, based on statistical probability, that at least some of the people coming from Mexico were good people. He assumed this despite all the evidence he'd seen--on Fox News, or in bold, screeching print in headlines in the paper, or heard on talk radio--because good people aren't front page news. He certainly had never met a good migrant, and so could not speak in definitive terms, but he was magnanimous enough to grant the likelihood that at least some of them probably weren't violent criminals or drug mules.
Still, something had to be done!
"I would build a great wall, and nobody builds walls better than me, believe me, and I’ll build them very inexpensively, I will build a great, great wall on our southern border. And I will have Mexico pay for that wall," he said.
Sad(!)ly, Trump has been unable to get his wall built. Mexico, understandably, won't pay for it. Congress won't pay for nor authorize it. The military probably can't build the wall, despite Trump's apparent belief that if he gives the Department of Defense enough extra money, they could just use some of that and start construction. Americans don't want it, don't think Mexico will pay for it, don't think Congress will pay for it, and don't think it will ever actually get built.
And while Trump remains committed to his brilliant, big, beautiful, and patent-pending idea of a GREAT WALL--"The Wall is the Wall, it has never changed or evolved from the first day I conceived of it"--it must be said that he spent the first 14+ months of his presidency on a fairly low boil about the southern border. At no point did he believe the situation to be so dire as to require anything more than a whining tweet or three per week about how nobody would let him build his wall.
Until Easter Sunday, when the real threat emerged.
We should be well beyond the point where any conceivable combination of words and phrases inserted into the following template should really surprise us: "It seems that because [INSERT FOX & FRIENDS SEGMENT], which played directly to Trump's [INSERT LONG-HELD, ERRONEOUS BELIEF ABOUT THE WAYS OF THE WORLD], and a conversation with [INSERT TERRIBLE SYCOPHANT], the president has decided to [INSERT SOMETHING AWFUL]." Despite the callus we should have built up about such things, still, the following really is a helluva thing to grapple with: "It seems that because Trump saw a Fox & Friends piece about a BuzzFeed article, which played directly into his longstanding beliefs about migrants, combined with the fact that he spent the weekend hanging out with Stephen Miller and Sean Hannity, the president has decided to deploy the military to protect the southern border."
So the chucklefucks at Fox & Friends freebased the Buzzfeed story into an adrenalized fear-rage Easter breakfast mist, which set Trump's little thumbs atwitter, and by Tuesday morning he was ready to line the border with the military to prevent the terrifying CARAVAN from gaining entry.
By Thursday, the president knew fully well just what sort of monsters were on their way north--rape victims, who need to be met with military force.
"Remember my opening remarks, at Trump Tower, when I opened, everybody said, 'Oh, he was so tough.' And I used the word 'rape.' And yesterday it came out, where, this journey coming up, women are raped at levels that nobody's ever seen before."
This is not twisting his words. This is not some bad-faith misunderstanding of what he has said. The president asserted that the women in the caravan are being raped at unprecedented levels, and that those women would be unwelcome in the United States, and would be met by the US military. So we've gone from needing a wall to protect us from the Mexican rapists, to not getting the wall, to needing the military to stand guard at the southern border to protect us from those who have been raped.
Of course, it's not true that the women in the caravan are being raped at unprecedented levels, whatever those would be. "The caravan was formed in part to provide safety in numbers for the immigrants. Kate Linthicum, a Times reporter who covered the caravan, described it as peaceful and family-oriented, with about 300 children among its members. She noted that women who are part of the caravan praised it as a much safer alternative to traveling alone or with smugglers. The possible theft of a few cellphones was the only crime alleged, Linthicum said." Not that it matters.
The clearest reading of Trump's comments are that he is unleashing an "I told you so" on his campaign-launching claim that Mexican immigrants are rapists, but that he didn't go far enough. That what he should have said is that Mexico is just plain full of rapists--that women can't even caravan through the country without being raped at "unprecedented" levels. Oh, and that when they finally make it to the border--raped and raped and raped again--they'll be turned about and sent back.
I can't believe, nearly three years into The Trumppening, that I still have the capacity to be astonished by his unabashed inhumanity. I should be relieved that I still have the capacity for it, I guess. Or maybe, he's just somehow, improbably, still sinking lower. This also came out this week, after all: "Later, when the agency’s head of drone operations explained that the CIA had developed special munitions to limit civilian casualties, the president seemed unimpressed. Watching a previously recorded strike in which the agency held off on firing until the target had wandered away from a house with his family inside, Trump asked, “Why did you wait?” one participant in the meeting recalled."
At the least, he's constantly reminding us all who he really is--who he's always been, who we are, for having put him there.
