Donald Trump’s caravan to hell
Polling this week suggests that when all voters are surveyed, they consider immigration to be the fifth most important issue in their decision making process, far behind other issues like health care. That’s not great news for Donald Trump, considering that he’s been putting most of his chips down on the notion that he can make immigration the central focus of next week’s elections. Further, he knows it’s not working.
Back before pro-Trump terrorists began trying to blow up and shoot up the United States, and our attention turned homeward, we were all very focused on the Saudi Arabian government’s brutal murder of Jamal Khashoggi. Donald Trump kept trying to make the argument that we should give the Saudis a free pass because of the sheer number of jobs created by the (largely imaginary) arms deal he had negotiated with them.
The trouble: no one was buying it, and Trump knew it. So he just kept escalating the number of jobs each time he spoke. Yes, he always speaks in clinically compelled hyperbole. But the surest sign that he knows his lies aren’t sticking is when he keeps upping the ante. Now he’s doing it again with the Central American caravan of poor, harmless, unarmed refugees, many of whom are children, who are about a thousand miles away from the United States border.
First Donald Trump told us that we should be scared of the caravan simply because it was full of Hispanic people. No one outside his racist base bought it. So then he decided that there were “unknown Middle Easterners” in the caravan, whatever that meant, and no one bought it. So then he started making up stories about them being trained fighters who destroyed the Mexican military, and everyone rolled their eyes. Then Trump’s liars on Fox News claimed that the people in the caravan had – we’re not making this up, but they are – smallpox and leprosy.
We’re tempted to sarcastically predict that by the end of the week Donald Trump will be claiming this caravan consists of Freddy Krueger and Voldermort, but we don’t want to give him any ideas. The point is this: if Trump’s original lie were working, he’d be sticking to it. He’s demonstrated that he understands the power of repetition as well as anyone in politics. Instead he keeps changing his story to something ever more outlandish, because he knows he hasn’t been able to get it to stick.
