Now we know where Donald Trump got that nonsense from about women being duct taped in cars

| 10:00 pm EST January 28, 2019
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For the past couple weeks, Donald Trump has repeatedly made claims about criminals driving across the U.S.-Mexico border in highly advanced cars with women whose mouths have been taped. Trump’s obsession with it has stood out as both extraordinarily creepy and oddly specific. We’ve all been wondering where he got this nonsense from. Now we have the answer, and it’s profoundly disconcerting.

On Monday evening, Rachel Maddow connected the dots during her MSNBC show and figured out that Donald Trump has been quoting scenes from the fictional movie Sicario: Day of the Soldado, which came out about six months ago. In the film, characters are indeed seen driving across the border in impossibly technologically advanced cars. The characters are also seen duct taping women’s mouths in these cars. In another movie scene, prayer rugs are found near the border, which is another recent claim that Trump has been making. So what’s going on here?

It’s clear that Donald Trump has been quoting scenes from a fictional movie as if they were really happening on the border. This is one of the scariest developments of the Trump era yet, because it points to just how far gone he truly is. It’s not clear if Trump watched the movie and then later convinced himself that the things he saw in it were real, or if his advisers have been feeding him clips from the movie and telling him that it’s real world footage. But either way, it means Trump isn’t anywhere close to being mentally competent.

So now what? No one outside of Donald Trump’s base ever believed any of the claims he was making to begin with. But we all assumed he was just making things up, or repeating misleading reports he heard on Fox News. Now that we know he’s basing his foreign policy on scenes from a fictional movie, this is grounds for immediate removal via the 25th Amendment.