Donald Trump is superb at highlighting issues that don’t exist, like public colleges offering gender-affirming surgical procedure with out consent. Look, any time Trump begins speaking about “the transgender factor,” you’ll be able to count on it’ll be unhealthy. However a riff at a current Mothers for Liberty occasion was significantly ugly—in addition to divorced from actuality. “Consider it; your child goes to high school, and he comes dwelling a number of days later with an operation,” Trump stated. “The college decides what’s going to occur along with your youngster.”
The supposition right here is that youngsters are routinely getting gender-affirming surgical procedures at colleges, during which—I assume?—docs are lurking round to carry out them. Or possibly it’s that college buses are being rerouted to hospitals? Both state of affairs is unhinged, and as CNN noted, “Trump’s personal presidential marketing campaign couldn’t present a single instance of this ever taking place.” However, Trump repeated the lie this previous weekend, saying, “Are you able to think about you’re a guardian and your son leaves the home and also you say, Jimmy, I like you a lot. Go have day at school and your son comes again with a brutal operation.”
There is no such thing as a world during which children are going below the knife in school, besides, apparently, in Trump’s post-truth world. It’s a darkish and scary place crammed with issues that don’t exist, albeit with doubtlessly terrifying options. And what’s actually scary is that if Trump can persuade sufficient Individuals that they really inhabit this place we’ll name Earth Two, he may return to the White Home.
Since coming into the political scene in 2015, Trump has uttered a dizzying stream of lies. Within the 4 years of his presidency alone, he made more than 30,000 false and misleading claims, based on The Washington Put up, and hasn’t stopped mendacity about his 2020 loss as we method the 2024 election. “Trump’s mendacity is most distinctive in its relentlessness, a unending avalanche of wrongness that may bury even essentially the most devoted fact-checkers,” considered one of them, CNN’s Daniel Dale, wrote final week. By some means the man who mused about purchasing Greenland sounds much more disconnected from actuality as he runs for president once more, frequently bringing up fictional serial killer Hannibal Lecter and seeming to mix up asylum-seekers and individuals who have been in psychological establishments, or asylums.
After all, Trump has been demonizing migrants since launching his 2016 marketing campaign, when he suggested that Mexico is “sending people who have a number of issues, and so they’re bringing these issues with us. They’re bringing medication. They’re bringing crime. They’re rapists. And a few, I assume, are good individuals.”
His harmful rhetoric has continued, with Trump telling Time in April that there can be “as many as 20 million” undocumented immigrants in the USA by the point Joe Biden is out of workplace, with “a lot of them from jails, a lot of them from prisons, a lot of them from psychological establishments.” (Pew estimated, as of 2022, that there are round 11 million undocumented immigrants residing within the US. Although estimates range, there are usually not believed to be 20 million—by no means thoughts 25 or 30 million, as Trump ally Marco Rubio has advised, according to PolitFact.)
Past Trump inflating the numbers, the dimensions of such a deportation plan even affecting 11 million individuals, because the Washington Put up’s Philip Bump noted, is “incomprehensible.” In the meantime, Trump torpedoed a bipartisan invoice earlier this 12 months to truly deal with immigration reform.
On Earth One, the place all of us reside, border crossings are means down. Citing US Customs and Border Safety statistics, USA Right now reported final month that the variety of migrant apprehensions alongside the southern border “plunged in July from a 12 months in the past, to the bottom degree of the Biden period.” Equally, because the US produces and exports “essentially the most crude oil out of any nation, at any time,” Trump portrays the Biden administration versus drilling—to the purpose that he can be required to be a “dictator” on day one to get the job accomplished. As Trump said in December, “I need to shut the border, and I need to drill, drill, drill.” Trump, nevertheless, dismisses the very actual drawback of local weather change.
Info are, in fact, irrelevant on Earth Two, the place Trump is taking fear-mongering over immigration to a brand new degree. He not too long ago claimed at a Fox Information city corridor that “Venezuelans are taking up the entire city” of Aurora, Colorado. However the AP reports that police within the Denver suburb “say a Venezuela avenue gang with a small presence within the metropolis has not taken over a rundown house complicated—but the allegation continues to realize steam amongst conservatives.” (Snopes has more on how a viral video has fueled rumors on the correct.)
As Trump took over the GOP, Republicans moved with him to Earth Two, specializing in non-existent issues that they may then “clear up.” Earlier this 12 months, Trump and Home Speaker Mike Johnson touted laws geared toward stopping one thing that’s already unlawful in America: noncitizens voting in federal elections. Regardless of voter fraud being extraordinarily uncommon, Republicans have develop into laser-focused on it below the guise of “election integrity,” presumably to go laws to make it tougher to vote. This shouldn’t come as a shock since Republicans demonstrated on January 6, 2021 that they wouldn’t hesitate to disenfranchise voters based mostly on election lies.
The trick of Trump’s unreality is that if sufficient individuals imagine it, it ceases to matter if it’s true or not. Based on a 2023 CBS survey, Trump voters belief him greater than their very own family and friends, conservative media, and even non secular leaders. So Trump appears to imagine (most likely rightly) that he can create his personal fact—that if sufficient of Trump’s individuals occupy Earth Two it doesn’t a lot matter what truly is going on on Earth One.
The issue for the remainder of us on Earth One is that Trump seems prepared to shred the Structure to deal with non-existent points like widespread voter fraud. On Sunday, Trump posted on Reality Social, “WHEN I WIN, these people who CHEATED can be prosecuted to the fullest extent of the Legislation, which is able to embrace long run jail sentences in order that this Depravity of Justice doesn’t occur once more … Please beware that this authorized publicity extends to Attorneys, Political Operatives, Donors, Unlawful Voters, & Corrupt Election Officers. These concerned in unscrupulous conduct can be sought out, caught, and prosecuted at ranges, sadly, by no means seen earlier than in our Nation.”
As Axios’s Alex Thompson explained, “Trump is now proposing two of the largest-ever federal arrests of individuals residing in America, together with U.S. residents, if he’s re-elected.” So there’s the proposed mass deportation of undocumented immigrants, which Trump warned this previous week “can be a bloody story” if he’s elected, together with jailing individuals over baseless election fraud claims. That is the stuff of autocrats, and it’s as much as the American individuals to determine in the event that they need to give Trump the ability to truly develop into one.
