The Washington Post’s Ashley Parker with a long overdue proper description of Trump’s campaign theme:
In Donald Trump’s imaginary world, Americans can’t venture out to buy a loaf of bread without getting shot, mugged or raped. Immigrants in a small Ohio town eat their neighbors’ cats and dogs. World War III and economic collapse are just around the corner. And kids head off to school only to return at day’s end having undergone gender reassignment surgery.
The former president’s imaginary world is a dark, dystopian place, described by Trump in his rallies, interviews, social media posts and debate appearances to paint an alarming picture of America under the Biden-Harris administration.
It is a distorted, warped and, at times, absurdist portrait of a nation where the insurrectionists who stormed the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021, to deadly effect were merely peaceful protesters, and where unlucky boaters are faced with the unappealing choice between electrocution or a shark attack. His extreme caricatures also serve as another way for Trump to traffic in lies and misinformation, using an alternate reality of his own making to create an often terrifying — and, he seems to hope — politically devastating landscape for his political opponents.
It goes on to describe many of the details, most of which you no doubt are aware of. But I wonder how many so-called “normies” who aren’t paying close attention know about this. Here’s just one example:
Immigration is another topic ripe for Trump’s land of make-believe. For example, the former president repeatedly references Hannibal Lecter, the fictional serial killer from “The Silence of the Lambs,” as a way of conflating migrants seeking asylum with people in mental institutions to suggest without evidence — but with dehumanizing language — that those crossing the U.S.-Mexico border are migrants from insane asylums.
“We have people that are being released into our country that we don’t want in our country,” Trump told a Wildwood, N.J., crowd in May, after mentioning “the late, great Hannibal Lecter.”
Trump also regularly claims that the government is putting up undocumented immigrants in “luxury hotels.” In Manhattan, for instance, the city has spent millions converting motels, office buildings and even some upscale hotels into housing for thousands of migrants, but the accommodations are shelter operations, not five-star opulence.
“You have soldiers right now laying on the streets of different cities, all Democrat-run. They’re laying on the streets in front of hotels, in some cases luxury hotels, and you have illegal immigrants coming in and living in those hotels and laughing at our soldiers, as they walk by into a luxury lobby,” Trump said during an economic speech in New York this month. “Is there something wrong with that thinking? Is there something wrong with our country?”
There is another way to describe all this, of course. Donald Trump is a pathological liar and a grotesque demagogue. But this will do.
The problem we have, as I’ve been annoyingly hammering, is that a very large plurality of the public either believes him or admires him for being the demagogic liar that he is because it triggers the libs. These are all people who seem to be in love with hate.
Either way, the fact that we have a man who is portraying America as a dystopian hellhole despite all evidence to the contrary virtually tied in the polls with the person living in the real world is profoundly disturbing.
