Nothing is ever his fault. It is always the fault of others: Joe Biden, Kamala Harris, the “deep state”, immigrants. While clearly Donald Trump, targeted by two assassination attempts in two months, is the victim of a climate of hatred that he maintains first and foremost and which he has made the basis of his re-election strategy. It is first and foremost he who, literally, weapons verbal violence. As a megalomaniac, Ryan Wesley Routh, the crusader who hid in the bushes of the Trump International Golf Club on Sunday to shoot him, curiously appears as the mirror of the ex-president. Defining him as a lone wolf poorly describes an event that is more broadly a social phenomenon in a torn country, where the use of political violence shocks at the same time as it is normalized, if not even considered acceptable. Routh’s community is that of social networks, as is the case for many of his fellow citizens, and his real world is a milieu where, as in Hollywood, the outcome is the annihilation of the enemy by arms.
Donald Trump’s outrageous and racist statements about Haitian immigrants eating dogs and cats in the small town of Springfield, Ohio, have become, since the presidential debate on September 10, the new benchmark for the enormity of his lies and the extremism of his political discourse. And since his main goal is to divide and conquer, the new assassination attempt is the perfect opportunity for him, less than 50 days before the presidential election on November 5, to blame it, with a lot of conspiratorial insinuations, on the Democratic “team.”
Far from retracting, Mr. Trump continued, in relation to Springfield, to peddle rumors and repeat himself abominably about the millions of “criminals” and “insane people” that Biden and Harris are “letting into the United States” and who are “destroying our country.” JD Vance, his enlightened running mate, put it another way in an interview with CNN, going so far as to assert that it was legitimate to “create stories so that the media will pay attention to the suffering of the American people.” So much so that, in this absurd theater of “alternative facts” in which Mr. Trump plays the leading role, lies have never been so true. It didn’t change anything that the Republican governor of Ohio, who nevertheless supports Trump’s re-election, deemed his remarks “ridiculous” by arguing that the Haitian community was making an eminently constructive contribution to the revival of the small municipality.
Springfield has been the focus of attention since the debate. But no less telling is Trump’s reference that night to the town of Aurora, Colorado, where a Venezuelan street gang, Tren de Aragua, had allegedly taken armed control of apartment buildings. A gang so powerful, the former president suggested, that it was virtually besieging the Denver suburb of 400,000. Which is simply not true.
The allusion was immediately contradicted by Mike Coffman, the Republican mayor of Aurora. Heard, he tried to correct, that the poor neighborhood of East Colfax has crime problems, but to say that gangs rule there is a gross exaggeration.
In this case, Mr. Coffman had already put his foot in it. For more than a year, the city has been trying to force the company that owns it, CBZ Management, to renovate three East Colfax apartment buildings. Last July, the mayor made the mistake of repeating without verifying CBZ’s reason for not repairing the apartments: that they were under gang control. The fake news metastasized, making headlines on Fox News and others.
It is up to Mr. Coffman, who is now kicking himself over it, to deconstruct the lie, if that is possible, since the issue is less about gangs than about access to housing and, in this case, crooked landlords. Against a backdrop of massive increases in rents and house prices, the Denver area has seen the arrival of about 40,000 migrants, many of them “expelled” by Texas Governor Greg Abbott. The people who live in these buildings, who are not all migrants, squat in lodgings infested with bedbugs and rats, with recurring water and electricity cuts.
“We’re going to do the biggest deportation in the history of the country — starting in Springfield and Aurora,” Trump proclaims. The immigration issue presents complex problems that Republicans and Democrats alike have been dragging out for decades, due to a lack of cooperation. The national housing shortage is estimated at between 4 million and 7 million units, which is critical. Neither problem will be permanently solved by “mass deportations.” But it is by promising to do so that Mr. Trump, with his big lies and populist hoofs, is likely to be reelected.