The new normal

I realize that President Donald Trump had a rough weekend. I can only imagine how upsetting it must be to plan your own birthday party with a big military parade to prove to everyone that you’re a special boy, and then when the day comes, the stands are two-thirds empty, the crowd size is roughly equivalent to the turnout at a Jeff Dunham puppet show at the Berglund Center, and the only sound you can hear is the squeak of the treads on a Sherman tank because apparently DOGE cut the Army’s budget for 3-in-1 Oil.

To make matters worse for Trump, the most conservative estimates put the turnout for the nationwide “No Kings” protests that took place on the same day at around five million people, or roughly 1.5 percent of the U.S. population. I imagine that stings, especially if your soul is a yawning chasm that begs to be filled with the respect and adoration of anyone who wanders into your field of vision. 

Like I said, it was a bad weekend for Trump, and I understand his mind was probably in a dark place. Having said that, Trump’s Father’s Day post on Truth Social was more chilling than usual.

I expect the post was actually written by Trump’s deputy chief of staff and political advisor Stephen “Wormtongue” Miller, but he did a solid job of nailing the random capitalization, so it’s difficult to tell. Nonetheless, let us take a journey through this unhinged post and break down the important points.

The post starts by praising the strength and courage of U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE), who Trump claims are being harassed by “Radical Democrat Politicians” just because they’re an army of masked brownshirts with seemingly no oversight who have taken to disappearing people off the streets in unmarked vans. Won’t somebody think of the poor ICE officers? You can’t even kidnap someone and send them to die in an El Salvadoran prison without getting criticized these days.

However, Trump continues, ICE should not be deterred in their important mission.

“ICE Officers are herewith ordered, by notice of this TRUTH, to do all in their power to achieve the very important goal of delivering the single largest Mass Deportation Program in History,” Trump wrote.

First off, announcing something on your social media site doesn’t make it a legal order. This is why those copied and pasted announcements that you’re not giving Mark Zuckerberg the rights to your Facebook photos of your grandkids don’t do anything.

Secondly, ICE has a lot of work to do to carry out the largest mass deportation in history. They’re competing against some real heavy hitters: the Holocaust, the Armenian Genocide, the Trail of Tears. But if anyone can do it, they can!

I’m going to quote Trump’s second paragraph at length because there’s a lot to unpack.

“We must expand efforts to detain and deport Illegal Aliens in America’s largest Cities, such as Los Angeles, Chicago, and New York, where Millions upon Millions of Illegal Aliens reside,” Trump wrote. “These, and other such Cities, are the core of the Democrat Power Center, where they use Illegal Aliens to expand their Voter Base, cheat in Elections, and grow the Welfare State, robbing good paying Jobs and Benefits from Hardworking American Citizens. These Radical Left Democrats are sick of mind, hate our Country, and actually want to destroy our Inner Cities … There is something wrong with them. That is why they believe in Open Borders, Transgender for Everybody, and Men playing in Women’s Sports.”

It’s hard to even tell where to begin here. First off, no one is supporting completely open borders, and absolutely no one believes in “Transgender for Everybody,” a phrase that falls somewhere between meaningless and insane. 

Next, I find it hard to believe that Democrats are cheating at elections, given the current state of the nation. The Democratic Party barely seems capable of winning elections much less cheating at them. 

Also, where are all these undocumented immigrants who are stealing the best jobs and living off welfare? Most undocumented immigrants I’ve seen have been working the worst jobs imaginable, like picking tobacco or doing hard manual labor on behalf of a contractor who’s paying them slave wages. No one has ever said, “Yeah, I almost got that job as bank manager, but instead they gave it to that guy who speaks ten words of English and doesn’t have a social security number.” 

Finally, the generation just hitting voting age likely won’t remember this, but there was once a time when a President served all the people in the country. He didn’t declare that the opposition party was a bunch of sick, twisted monsters who hate America. The problem with that sort of rhetoric is that it can cause the President’s base to do something really bad. To pick a random example, someone might become radicalized by that sort of message and then impersonate a police officer in order to assassinate a state lawmaker and grievously injure another one. 

The post goes on to say that REAL Americans are cheering on ICE, which is one of the more blatant examples of the “no true Scotsman” fallacy I’ve seen recently. Trump adds that “Mass Destruction Migration” has turned “once Idyllic Towns into scenes of Third World Dystopia,” and that the federal government will continue to focus on “the REMIGRATION of Aliens to the places from where they came.”

By the way, if you haven’t heard the term “remigration” before, it’s an idea that comes to us from far-right parties in Europe and has been likened to ethnic cleansing. It’s basically sending non-white immigrants and their descendants back to their country of origin regardless of their citizenship status. It’s a horrifically cruel concept, and the use of that specific term was not a mistake. 

For the last ten years or so, the popular refrain on the left has been that none of this is normal. Maybe this sort of rhetoric isn’t normal, but after that much time, it’s become unsurprising and largely expected. We’re currently experiencing an era in which the U.S. Justice Department will charge you with domestic terrorism for vandalizing a Tesla dealership but not for assassinating a sitting state Representative you disagree with politically.

But I guess I’m missing the whole point of Trump’s post, which is that we should all have sympathy for poor misunderstood ICE. Just like its namesake, the agency is cold, hard, and doing its level best to ruin the lives of everyone who lives in a major city up north. 

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