1. President Trump. We are all used to Donald Trump being the crookedest man ever win the presidency. He lies constantly, about everything, all the time. Most of those lies are designed to prop up his own ego; he is forever telling tales about the size of his rally crowds or how he heard from an unnamed so-and-so, in private, who praised him for his brilliance. Other lies are attempts to dodge responsibility for his blunders or to hoodwink his audience about his own past acts. But then there are the lies that can only be described as dementia-like, in which Trump claims to have seen things that nobody else around him have seen and be roundly furious that nobody else will acknowledge them. Things that he may have seen in movies or had a vivid dream about, but do not comport with the reality the rest of us inhabit in any way, shape or form.
In his latest demented fiction, he said:
“The Democrats are making a strong push to abolish ICE, one of the smartest, toughest and most spirited law enforcement groups of men and women that I have ever seen. I have watched ICE liberate towns from the grasp of MS-13 & clean out the toughest of situations. They are great!
The notion that he has “watched ICE liberate towns from the grasp of MS-13” is so wrong as to not even be nonsensical. It is a flat delusion. There are no towns “under the grasp of MS-13” to begin with; despite the gang’s new status among anti-immigrant lobbyists and Republican neo-Nazis as a talking point, it is a violent but largely powerless collection of teenage schoolyard thugs targeting local victims. Their role in the drug trade is minimal, and their role in human smuggling non-existent. The goals of local gang leaders are to control schoolyards–the notion that they could seize control of a “town” is a lunatic claim.
Which brings us to the next bit; not only are there no “towns” that have been liberated, but ICE, a border agency, would not be liberating squat to begin with. That is not what they do. It is not even close to what they do, and it is not clear the sitting president even knows what they do. The Immigration and Customs Enforcement agency enforces border security; it does not conduct military operations to liberate cities. The region most commonly associated with MS-13 violence even in Republican minds is Long Island, New York; ICE does not conduct paramilitary town-liberation efforts on Long Island. If Trump is referring to the liberation of some non-American town, ICE does not go there. It processes immigrants, refugees, tourists, and the contents of shipping containers. It does not liberate towns!
What appears to have happened here is that Donald Trump has taken a Republican talking point–the identification of “MS-13” as the only majority-brown-skinned gang that anybody can think of, now inflated into a racist stand-in for all Latino immigrants everywhere because racism remains the only force capable of uniting Republican voters, and made up a movie in his own head in which not only had they taken over entire (United States?) towns, but were then met by border patrol and customs agents who swept in and “liberated” the town in daring raids.
This is evidence of dementia or other mental illness, including pathological fiction-inventing, malignant narcissism run amok, or something else. It goes beyond his usual egotistical polishing; the man either earnestly believes he has witnessed something nobody else in the world has seen, a story populated by figures that bear no resemblance to their real-world counterparts in the slightest, or his compulsion to lie is so extraordinary that he cannot help but invent claims. Whatever one calls it, Donald Trump is not fit for public office.
