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topicnews · September 23, 2024

Donald Trump’s imaginary and frightening world

Donald Trump’s imaginary and frightening world

Ashley Parker
| WashingtonPost

In Donald Trump’s fantasy world, Americans can’t buy bread without being shot, robbed, or raped. In a small Ohio town, immigrants eat their neighbors’ cats and dogs. World War III and economic collapse are imminent. And children go to school only to return home at the end of the day after sex reassignment surgery.

The former president’s imaginary world is a dark, dystopian place that Trump describes in his rallies, interviews, social media posts and debate appearances to paint an alarming picture of America under the Biden-Harris administration.

It’s a distorted, warped and sometimes absurd portrait of a nation in which the insurrectionists who stormed the U.S. Capitol with deadly effect on Jan. 6, 2021, were merely peaceful protesters, and in which hapless boaters face the unpleasant choice between being electrocuted or attacked by a shark. His extreme caricatures also serve as another way for Trump to traffic in lies and misinformation, using an alternate reality of his own creation to create an often terrifying — and, he seems to hope, politically devastating — landscape for his political opponents.

Trump, for example, regularly claims that Democrats are in favor of abortion up to the day of birth – and in some cases even afterward.

At the presidential debate with Vice President Kamala Harris on September 10 in Philadelphia, Trump falsely claimed that Harris’ running mate, Minnesota Governor Tim Walz, said, “An abortion in the ninth month is absolutely fine.””

“He also says that ‘post-birth execution’ – execution, no longer abortion, because the baby is born – is OK,” Trump continued.

In fact, Walz did not say this, as the Washington Post Fact Checker found, and “postpartum execution” — or infanticide — is illegal in all states. According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, in 2021, nearly all abortions — 93.5 percent — occurred at 13 weeks or earlier, and less than 1 percent were performed after 21 weeks.

If Trump is not elected in November, World War III is almost certain, the former president has repeatedly claimed. In July, before a meeting with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu at his private Mar-a-Lago club, Trump told reporters that only his election victory could avert another global conflagration.

“If we win, it will be very easy. Everything will be fine and very quickly,” Trump said. “If not, there will be major wars in the Middle East and perhaps a Third World War. We are closer to a Third World War now than at any time since World War II. We have never been closer because our country is run by incompetent people.”

And this month, shortly after it was revealed that former Republican Vice President Dick Cheney and his daughter Liz Cheney, a former Republican congresswoman from Wyoming, planned to vote for Harris, Trump attacked them on his website Truth Social. “I am the president of peace, and only I will prevent World War III!” he claimed.

“He’s not the same candidate he was in 2016 or 2020,” said Simon Rosenberg, a Democratic strategist who noted Trump’s “imaginary world” in a post on X this month. “He’s much weaker and more disengaged.”

“The percentage of time he spends in the real world versus his dystopian world decreases. He just doesn’t talk about things that are true in this world that we all live in,” Rosenberg said.

“It is true that economic hardship, tragedies at the border and two new wars have erupted under Vice President Kamala Harris, and four more years of her policies will only worsen the pain and suffering,” Karoline Leavitt, the Trump campaign’s national press secretary, said in a statement. “President Trump speaks the hard truth about this reality and has an optimistic vision for the future to make America strong, safe and prosperous again by securing the border, cutting taxes, reducing inflation and restoring peace to the world as it existed during his first term.”

Asked to provide specific examples of all the claims Trump made, Leavitt sent a list that in some cases – such as schools that perform gender reassignment surgeries – contained no evidence to support the claims. In other cases – such as not being able to buy groceries without being harassed – Leavitt provided several examples of such crimes, but not the mass phenomena that justify Trump’s claim that “you can’t cross the street to get a loaf of bread; you get shot, you get mugged, you get raped.”

While some of Trump’s supporters accept his false claims as irrefutable truths, others accuse him of sometimes exaggerating, but in doing so accurately expressing their fears about the nation’s real problems.

“I don’t think he’s exaggerating the truth,” said Trump supporter Marelee Ernestberg, 59, as she defended some of his more extreme falsehoods, including his baseless claim that Haitian migrants eat pets, which she called “absolute truth” and which didn’t surprise her. “Trump is not a liar.”

At her first Trump rally in Las Vegas earlier this month, Ernestberg changed her mind when addressing Trump’s claim that children were undergoing gender reassignment surgery in school – saying the list of falsehoods didn’t interest her.

“Now, of course, everyone is exaggerating. … Trump is not perfect, and when I look at a candidate, I’m not looking for perfection. I’m not going to marry the guy,” she said. “I’m not looking for a spouse. I’m looking for someone who will make this country a safer place.”

Immigration is also a topic that is almost predestined for Trump’s fantasy world. The former president repeatedly refers to Hannibal Lecter, the fictional serial killer from “The Silence of the Lambs,” to equate asylum seekers with people in mental institutions and to suggest, without evidence but with dehumanizing language, that those who cross the US-Mexico border are migrants from mental institutions.

“There are people being released into our country that we don’t want in our country,” Trump told a crowd in Wildwood, New Jersey, in May, after mentioning “the late, great Hannibal Lecter.”

Trump also regularly claims that the government is housing illegal immigrants in “luxury hotels.” In Manhattan, for example, the city has spent millions to convert motels, office buildings and even some upscale hotels into housing for thousands of migrants, but the accommodations are homeless shelters, not five-star luxury.

“Right now, soldiers are lying on the streets of various cities, all run by Democrats. They’re lying on the streets in front of hotels, in some cases luxury hotels, and we have illegal immigrants who live in those hotels who laugh at our soldiers when they walk into a luxury lobby,” Trump said this month during an economic speech in New York. “Is there something wrong with that way of thinking? Is there something wrong with our country?”

And recently, Trump also began falsely claiming that a Venezuelan gang had taken over an apartment complex in Aurora, Colorado — prompting the local police department to release a video statement saying that after speaking with residents, they were seeing a “different picture.” Yes, the police chief continued, some gang members lived in the Aurora community, but “gang members did not take over this complex.”

However, Trump was not discouraged.

“You saw in Aurora, Colorado, a group of very tough young thugs from Venezuela occupying large areas, including buildings,” Trump said in a podcast, despite police claiming otherwise. “They’re occupying buildings. They’ve got their big guns. But they’re occupying buildings. We’re not going to let that happen.”

At the presidential debate, an angry Trump repeated the baseless claim that Haitian immigrants in Springfield, Ohio, were eating the town’s pets.

“In Springfield, they’re eating the dogs,” Trump said. “The people who came here are eating the cats. They’re eating the pets of the people who live there.”

It is also a continuation of Trump’s constant lies and obfuscations; an analysis by the Washington Post’s Fact Checker found that Trump has made more than 30,000 false or misleading claims during his presidency alone – an average of about 21 untruths per day.

Another popular Trump claim is that tourists come to the capital to see the sights – and end up traveling home in body bags. When Trump accepted his party’s nomination in Milwaukee in July, he railed sharply against the capital, calling it “a terrible battlefield.”

According to DC Police, crime in DC actually increased between 2022 and 2023, when overall crime increased by 26 percent — and violent crime increased by 39 percent. But so far this year, both crimes have decreased compared to 2023 numbers.

There have been several recent high-profile cases of out-of-towners being killed while in Washington DC, including a woman visiting the city for a concert and a teacher attending a conference. But Trump’s rhetoric is greatly exaggerated.

“They leave Wisconsin, go to see the Washington Monument, and end up getting stabbed, killed or shot,” Trump said in Milwaukee.

The former president has also addressed gender reassignment surgery as another area for whitewashing.

“Imagine you’re a parent, your son leaves the house and you say, ‘Jimmy, I love you so much. Go have a great day at school’ – and your son comes back from a brutal surgery,” Trump said at a rally in Wisconsin this month.

Then Trump told a similarly fabricated story in his speech in Arizona last Thursday.

“Can you imagine this?” the former president asked. “Your child goes to school and they don’t even call you and they change the gender of your child.”

Many of Trump’s fictional scenarios go unchecked in real time, in part because he’s pitching them to captivated audiences or sympathetic news outlets. But at this month’s debate, the moderators were prepared for his fictional world.

After Trump made his claim that immigrants eat cats and dogs, ABC News’ David Muir interjected: “You mention Springfield, Ohio, and ABC News reached out to the city manager there. He told us there were no credible reports of specific allegations that pets belonging to individuals in the immigrant community had been injured or mistreated.”

But Trump didn’t let up.

“People on TV are saying my dog ​​was kidnapped and used as food!” Trump insisted, resorting to the often fictional world of television to support his own fantasy.

– – –

Abbie Cheeseman in Las Vegas contributed to this report.

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