Opinion: Trump concocts a racist, dystopian version of America only he can save us from
Great news, fellow Americans! Donald Trump is going to save us from the racist dystopia he has completely fabricated!
It’s clear that in the closing weeks of this presidential campaign, an aging and increasingly uncoupled-from-reality Trump will lean ever harder into utterly false Hitlerian fan fiction. The GOP presidential nominee will keep telling his rally crowds that immigrants, including those here legally, have transformed our country into a violent hellscape in which murder, rape, torture and the rampant destruction of small towns and cities are commonplace.
Trump will say “they” ? MILLIONS OF “THEM”! ? have killed the economy and taken all the jobs and eaten all the pets and committed all the crimes. The simple fact that border crossings have plummeted, the economy is booming, unemployment is low, everyone’s pets are fine and crime is down means nothing. They’re just examples of the socialists, Marxists and communists lying to you, right?
Trump sees imaginary 'army of illegal alien gang members'
Here’s what Trump said of Democratic presidential nominee Kamala Harris “and her radical-left cronies” at a weekend rally/hate-fest in Arizona:
“For four straight years, she's imported an army of illegal alien gang members and migrant criminals from the dungeons all over the world. ... From prisons and jails, insane asylums, mental institutions. From Venezuela, from the Congo, all over. And she's resettled them into your communities to prey upon innocent American people. If Kamala gets four more years, the entire country will be turned into a migrant camp, and that's what's happening. Millions and millions of people.”
That’s what’s happening, folks.
“Them” have been resettled into your communities, and those former dungeon dwellers and insane asylum inhabitants are preying on innocent people.
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We can't see this racist dystopia, but Trump swears it's there
You might not be seeing any of that happen. You might be reading about statistical evidence showing that none of that is happening. You might even look at a history book and read how this kind of dehumanizing rhetoric and fearmongering is part of the authoritarian playbook, how it directly echoes the way Nazis spoke about Jews during the time of Adolf Hitler.
But you need to ignore all that because the former president has a vision, and he’s sticking with it, dammit. Best of all, he has the solution to these fabricated problems: Donald Trump.
“When I win on November 5th,” Trump said at a weekend rally in California, “the migrant invasion ends and the restoration of our country begins.”
In Aurora, Colorado, on Friday, Trump declared: “I will rescue Aurora and every town that has been invaded and conquered. We will put these vicious and bloodthirsty criminals in jail or kick them out of our country.”
I’m sure that’s great news for the people of Aurora, where police data shows the crime rate is down 17.2% and the Republican mayor says the city has most definitely not been invaded or conquered. At all.
Why are facts out to get a 78-year-old racist running for president?
I know what you’re thinking: KNOCK IT OFF, FACTS, YOU’RE INTERFERING WITH FORMER PRESIDENT TRUMP’S XENOPHOBIC FEVER DREAM!
I mean, what does a 78-year-old white guy have to do to scare the tuna salad out of other white people and make them live in fear of waves of nonexistent murderous brown people?
I’ll tell you what he has to do. He has to use terms like “sadistic monsters” and “animals” to describe immigrants. He has to say immigrants have “infested” the buildings in which they live.
He has to make things up, as he did in Colorado, like this: “People come in, they're very sick. Very sick. They're coming into our country, they're very, very very sick with highly contagious disease. And they're let into our country to infect our country.”
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He has to say, “I will invoke the Aliens Enemies Act of 1798,” which was horrifically used to justify the imprisonment of Japanese Americans during World War II.
He has to say of the legal Haitian migrants in Springfield, Ohio: “You have to get ’em the hell out. You have to get them out. I’m sorry.”
Only Trump can save us from this imaginary world he's lying about
He’s sorry, folks. He’s sorry he’s going to have to round up legal migrants and destroy their lives and entire communities here in the United States to fix the fake problem he opportunistically dredged out of his spider-filled brain.
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You see, the fact-less, white-supremacist-worthy version of America that Trump has ginned up can, conveniently, only be saved by Trump himself. So if you believe the vision ? if you also are seeing things that aren’t there and believing things that are absolute bunk ? then Trump is the savior of all you hold dear. Electing him, he would argue, is the only way to reverse the nightmare you're allegedly living.
But there is another path.
If Trump loses, he and his racist imaginings are sent packing. The false, fear-filled version of America he spun out of whole cloth goes poof. And then, maybe, reality can make a comeback. Maybe the fever dreams can break.
Maybe, at last, we can Make Stupidity Embarrassing Again.
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This article originally appeared on USA TODAY: Opinion: Trump bashes America, dehumanizes immigrants for votes