PUBLISHED TO
Via Attorney General Bill Barr, Donald Trump is now overtly
transforming the Department of Justice into his personal agency bent on drumming up false charges against his enemies while protecting those that break laws on his behalf.
It is catastrophic. And it is all happening on behalf of a would-be
tyrant who is steadfastly incompetent and a habitual liar, and whose
behavior strongly mirrors that of someone rapidly declining into
dementia.
A particularly bizarre moment during his Monday rally had Trump again going on about his wall, "illegal aliens," and "redemption." It is worth picking apart, because even in the midst of a rally that featured "Lock her up" chants about his political enemies and claims that "we should impeach" former President Barack Obama," it appeared to be the result of a short-circuiting mind.
It's difficult to make out just what this gibberish is intended to mean. There is the overtly racist use of "illegal aliens," par for the mini-Mussolini course. But "redemption money"? And it's "paying for the wall"? What?
Working backward, though, we might be able to decipher it. By "redemption money," Trump appears to mean "remittances," the term used for money sent by migrant workers back to their families in their home nations.
Trump's vocabulary has been declining precipitously in recent years, and it is likely he could not call up the right word here—something that happens to all of us, but that happens with increasing frequency in the middle stages of dementia. (Feel free to chastise me for making such diagnoses; after watching too many hours of Trump holding forth to be able to count, I stand firmly behind it.) So the first bit is Trump forgetting a key word underpinning whatever thought he was attempting to have.
"Illegal aliens" is straight racist-bait. He means undocumented migrants, but we can assume he is intentionally using the aliens language rampant in white nationalist and white supremacist circles, which has been scrubbed from most government speech. Or at least had been.
The last part is the head-scratcher. How would remittances, small checks sent to families abroad by those working in this country, either illegally or not, be paying for a Trump border erection? What the hell is this angry and strange man going on about now?
Reaching waaaaaay back, he might be referring to an absolutely batshit insane plan floated in the earliest months of the Trump presidency, only to be ditched because of the aforementioned batshit insanity. The proposed 2016 plan would have barred Mexican migrants from sending money back home, period, until the Mexican government agreed to pay for Trump's border wall. (Trump's plans for most things appear to revolve around extortion—perhaps it is only a case of the man going with his strengths?)
There were numerous problems with this, all of which revolve around it being extremely stupid. There's no plausible way for money transferrers to tell which transactions would be illegal under this scheme. There's no plausible way to prevent money from being sent in myriad other ways, either as cash in an envelope, through nonbank transactions, or by having a traveling third party simply take the cash with them.
Money sent home is a boon for the United States, boosting economic activity in those other countries, raising living standards, and resulting in higher demand for U.S.-produced goods. And finally, not even Republicans really want to stifle the flow of migrant workers into the United States.
It would be a disaster for a great many industries in a great many states. It is not clear that Devin Nunes' family's not-in-California dairy farm, for example, would survive a true shutdown of migrant labor.
The plan, then, was dead on arrival. So what's Trump going on about, nearly three years later? He said, "The redemption money is paying for the wall," and every bit of that eight-word phrase is wrong. It's not paying for the wall. The plan was never enacted, and we've heard nothing about it.
What is actually paying for the wall is the United States military, as Trump has repeatedly used emergency powers to seize money allocated for military base housing, schooling, medical facilities, and other improvements to redirect toward his wall.
So what's going on? That part we don't know. It could be one of several things.
Trump might simply be lying, and he might know he's lying. He's telling his base that "redemptions" are paying for the wall, while forgetting the proper word but knowing full well it’s never happened. A possibility.
A particularly bizarre moment during his Monday rally had Trump again going on about his wall, "illegal aliens," and "redemption." It is worth picking apart, because even in the midst of a rally that featured "Lock her up" chants about his political enemies and claims that "we should impeach" former President Barack Obama," it appeared to be the result of a short-circuiting mind.
It's difficult to make out just what this gibberish is intended to mean. There is the overtly racist use of "illegal aliens," par for the mini-Mussolini course. But "redemption money"? And it's "paying for the wall"? What?
Working backward, though, we might be able to decipher it. By "redemption money," Trump appears to mean "remittances," the term used for money sent by migrant workers back to their families in their home nations.
Trump's vocabulary has been declining precipitously in recent years, and it is likely he could not call up the right word here—something that happens to all of us, but that happens with increasing frequency in the middle stages of dementia. (Feel free to chastise me for making such diagnoses; after watching too many hours of Trump holding forth to be able to count, I stand firmly behind it.) So the first bit is Trump forgetting a key word underpinning whatever thought he was attempting to have.
"Illegal aliens" is straight racist-bait. He means undocumented migrants, but we can assume he is intentionally using the aliens language rampant in white nationalist and white supremacist circles, which has been scrubbed from most government speech. Or at least had been.
The last part is the head-scratcher. How would remittances, small checks sent to families abroad by those working in this country, either illegally or not, be paying for a Trump border erection? What the hell is this angry and strange man going on about now?
Reaching waaaaaay back, he might be referring to an absolutely batshit insane plan floated in the earliest months of the Trump presidency, only to be ditched because of the aforementioned batshit insanity. The proposed 2016 plan would have barred Mexican migrants from sending money back home, period, until the Mexican government agreed to pay for Trump's border wall. (Trump's plans for most things appear to revolve around extortion—perhaps it is only a case of the man going with his strengths?)
There were numerous problems with this, all of which revolve around it being extremely stupid. There's no plausible way for money transferrers to tell which transactions would be illegal under this scheme. There's no plausible way to prevent money from being sent in myriad other ways, either as cash in an envelope, through nonbank transactions, or by having a traveling third party simply take the cash with them.
Money sent home is a boon for the United States, boosting economic activity in those other countries, raising living standards, and resulting in higher demand for U.S.-produced goods. And finally, not even Republicans really want to stifle the flow of migrant workers into the United States.
It would be a disaster for a great many industries in a great many states. It is not clear that Devin Nunes' family's not-in-California dairy farm, for example, would survive a true shutdown of migrant labor.
The plan, then, was dead on arrival. So what's Trump going on about, nearly three years later? He said, "The redemption money is paying for the wall," and every bit of that eight-word phrase is wrong. It's not paying for the wall. The plan was never enacted, and we've heard nothing about it.
What is actually paying for the wall is the United States military, as Trump has repeatedly used emergency powers to seize money allocated for military base housing, schooling, medical facilities, and other improvements to redirect toward his wall.
So what's going on? That part we don't know. It could be one of several things.
Trump might simply be lying, and he might know he's lying. He's telling his base that "redemptions" are paying for the wall, while forgetting the proper word but knowing full well it’s never happened. A possibility.
Trump might be lying, but not know he's lying. Trump's staff members, who regularly lie on his behalf to the public in what are now well-documented efforts to keep Trump from unleashing his bizarre narcissism-fueled temper on them, might have simply told him that his plan worked and the money is flowing into government coffers, somehow. Also a possibility, and you and I both know it.
Trump might be in the throes of a dementia episode, in which past memories become both vividly recent and haphazardly jumbled. He might truly remember that his once-upon-a-time plan was a plan, and truly remember that it was implemented, and worked, and that he emerged a hero with a paid-for wall.
His strange language tends to suggest as much: not remembering the key phrase, not remembering the details. (The remittances were a tool for forcing Mexico, somehow, to pay for the wall, but were themselves never(?) going to be outright seized by the Trump government to pay for it. He's talking gibberish even in the context of his gibberish.)
That's possible too. And you know it, and I know it.
There aren't any other immediate explanations, though. It is absolutely impossible for Trump to have been really seizing the money or that secretly, well, Mexico is funding the wall and Trump's emergency declarations taking cash from U.S. troops are actually just sending that cash into the Mar-a-Lago accounts for safekeeping. He's either lying or he's lying, as usual.
It's the shape of the lie here that is the strangest thing. We could eventually parse out what Trump was attempting to say, but it would take a great deal of work, because what he was actually blurting out, in his words, was so far afield from it that it was simply incoherent.
He's not well. He is in fact in some sort of extreme distress, and the only question is what sort of distress it is.
Is his narcissism so great that he truly believes he can lie new facts into being? Is his mental decline so severe that he genuinely cannot remember the outcomes of his acts a mere three years back?
There is no answer that does not disqualify him from his office for rank dangerousness. If Mike Pence were anything but a supplicating toady, he and the rest of the Trump staff would long ago have admitted to the nation that this man cannot continue to govern, not in this condition.
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