The Origin Stories of Trump's Most Outrageous Statements Somehow Manage to Make Things Even Worse
Trump on post-birth abortion (that is, murder). Trump on "transgender operations" on prisoners. Trump on immigrants -- immigrants who are in the country legally, by the way -- and eating pets. Those were three of Donald Trump's more outrageous moments in his non-debate last week with Vice President Kamala Harris. There were many more false claims, only a few of which I managed to pack into my long review of the non-debate here on Dorf on Law last Wednesday. Of the many lies that I had to leave out of my response, this bizarre claim about President Biden was the last to be cut to reduce the word count: "And you know what? I'll give you a little secret. He hates her. He can't stand her."
Those lies all sounded as if they came from outer space (or some other empty space). But we are now relearning that what comes out of Trump's mouth is quite often not some spontaneous and opportunistic fabrication. We are accustomed to hearing about the fever swamps on the right, but it is easy to forget just how extreme the insanity is in the virtual spaces that Trump frequents. It turns out that many of the most notably insane moments from Trump last week were not simply the result of his riffing. Instead, he hears things and reads things in a world that few people in the non-Trump world are aware of, and he then repeats -- though often in his characteristically garbled form -- those weird claims as if everyone knows that they are true.
When that happens, those of us who do not follow the latest conspiracy theories and obsessions of the most extreme, fascist right tend to assume that Trump's "great brain" simply came up with these oddball things on its own. We attribute his flights of mendacity to ignorance and confusion, combined with racism and megalomania, which could in fact explain many of the things that Trump has said. To be clear, however, "explain" does not at all mean "justify." We are trying to understand how Trump could say that Harris is both a fascist and a communist, for example, and we do our best to figure out how he got from point A to a four-dimensional miasma.
This phenomenon predates Trump. George W. Bush confused people at one point by talking about the Dred Scott decision, and people who are not on the extreme right looked at each other and said, "Wait, what? What is he talking about? Did he get confused and mention the first Supreme Court case he could think of, to try to sound more informed than he is? Yikes." It turned out, however, that it was worse than that. Mentioning Dred Scott was code among a subset of Republicans for being anti-abortion. I will not bother decoding it here, because the point is simply that it was "a thing" that people on the right knew.
That meant that Bush was not (as people like me assumed) being addled and ignorant in that moment. But again, the accurate explanation of what he was doing was even worse, because he was dog-whistling his way through his campaign and pretending that he was not as extreme as he was.
In the six days since last week's non-debate, the world has learned that a lot of the most befuddling things that Trump said were not out-of-nowhere brain farts. They have backstories, and the explanations are turning out to be even worse than the more innocent Trump-as-buffoon explanations that many commentators (including me) originally offered.
The three examples that I mentioned at the top of this column -- murdering babies, transgender surgery, and eating pets -- are all variations on this phenomenon of Trump intoning what seem to be gibberish words that turn out to be evil and calculating, not mere nonsense.
Example 1: Trump has claimed for months that Democrats want to allow people to kill newborn babies. People like me probably should have suspected that this was a Dred Scott-like code on the right, because other Republicans had been saying much the same thing, but I assumed that that was simply culture warriors repeating what Trump had said, not the other way around. The real story, as ever, is worse.
As various news sources have now reported, the anti-abortion right has for years been pushing a lie based on an interview in which former Virginia governor Ralph Northam explained the extremely rare instances in which a fetus will be doomed to a quick (within minutes) and often painful death if it is born. With the participation of multiple doctors, the person carrying the fetus will be asked what to do if the pregnancy results in a live birth. Northam explained that the newborn is made as comfortable as possible while the doctors and family decide whether to resuscitate or palliate, given that there is no hope of survival.
So now Trump manages to put his spin on things, confusing Virginia with West Virginia and asserting that Democrats want to allow people to kill healthy newborn babies: "In other words, we'll execute the baby." But this means that he is not freestyling and coming up with a lie on his own, because he gets his source material by spending time on the fringes of the internet (and spending time in person with conspiracy theorists). He is not momentarily confused or off on a tangent of his own making. He bothers to learn (sort of) the lie that is being told, and he then amplifies it, repeating and further distorting it at rallies and in the non-debate.
Example 2: In the non-debate, Trump said this about Vice President Harris: "Now she wants to do transgender operations on illegal aliens that are in prison. This is a radical left liberal that would do this." In my review of the non-debate, I did my best to imagine how Trump managed to come up with something so ludicrous:
Huh? Trump is used to talking about reassignment surgeries -- saying over and over again at his rallies that kids are getting such surgeries at school (apparently involuntarily?) -- and he is used to talking about "illegal aliens" and about crime and prisons (even though the immigrants being in prison would suggest that Biden/Harris are in fact enforcing criminal laws), so why not do a mash-up and put them all into a bigger, compound lie?
That explanation was, in retrospect, rather kind. Again, however, it turns out that this is something that Trump has drawn from the fever swamps. The story that he is telling is a deliberate distortion that resembles the Northam distortion, but it is in some ways worse. And even some mainstream right-wing commentators have tried to defend Trump on this, which is a surprise until we learn that it is simply another example of their modus operandi, cherry-picking and distorting reality for political gain.
One of the post-2016 efforts by The Washington Post to insulate itself against claims of being "the enemy of the people" (an effort that is as futile as it is ridiculous, but I digress) was its decision to hire someone named Megan McArdle as an op-ed columnist a few years ago. She is a piece of work for a number of reasons, but putting all of that aside, yesterday she grabbed onto TrumpWorld's "but the Democrats and the press are lying" about the transgender-surgeries-in-prison story. How does that work?
McArdle framed her column around the idea that Democrats are extreme and out of touch and thus need to lie about their true views. Nothing unusual about that libel from conservatives, of course. But here, she claims to have a devastating "fact" with which to defend Trump. She pointed out that Time had issued a correction to an earlier fact-check, with the magazine now saying this: "As a presidential candidate in 2019, Harris filled out a questionnaire saying she supported taxpayer-funded gender transition treatment for detained immigrants."
Checkmate! Right? Not at all. This is yet another example of the laziest kind of fact-checking, because even though fact-checkers will say things like "This is out of context" or "This is a matter of interpretation" when fact-checking Trump, there is no effort here to offer context or interpretation.
To begin, Trump is wrong to say: "Now she wants to ...," because the questionnaire was from 2019, but he is making it sound as if she is coming up with yet another crazy position "now." Harris has understandably (in terms of raw politics) not bothered to bring attention to the story by confirming or changing her position, but it is certainly not something that is happening "now."
But maybe Trump somehow should receive credit for being "merely rhetorical," or something? That also fails. Trump said that "she wants to do transgender operations on illegal aliens that are in prison," which is definitely not what Harris's answer to the questionnaire said. She has said nothing about wanting such operations to happen. At most, she has said that if such an operation were approved in a prison setting, the care for the patient (the "illegal alien" in prison) should be paid for in exactly the same way that care for a documented alien in prison or a US national in prison would be handled.
Trump, then, is repeating an attack line that his staff's oppo research dug up, saying that Harris wants to find non-US citizens in prisons and have surgeries performed on them. (The question asked about “treatment,” not only “surgery,” by the way, which has never been performed on an undocumented immigrant in custody.) As in the Northam example discussed above, Trump is taking a comment about a complicated medical situation and distorting it to make it sound unacceptable.
Even so, a Republican might object that it is in fact unacceptable to most Americans to use taxpayer money to provide gender-affirming care to non-US citizens. In that case, even the de-Trumpified version would nonetheless be bad for Harris. That is certainly what McArdle is attempting to pull off. But this simply tries to inflame people's emotions by targeting a reviled minority and making it sound as if Harris wants to given them special treatment — and at taxpayer expense to boot! As I will explain after a brief (but relevant) digression, that is disgustingly dishonest.
Back in the late 1990's, Oklahoma (like much of the South and Southwest) was in the final stages of becoming fully and extremely Republican. The few center-right Democrats in Oklahoma who remained after the Dixiecrats had moved en masse to their natural home in the Reagan-infused Republican Party were watching in horror as the state became crazier and crazier. A friend of mine had recently moved to the Sooner State for professional reasons, and he told me about a local example of what was then a relatively new version of all-culture-wars-all-the-time grievance politics. It was a doozy.
One of the more notoriously unhinged members of the state legislature had taken it upon himself to invent wedge issues, almost as sport. One day, he outdid himself. At that time, family minivans were already quite popular, and automakers had started to include amenities such as small TV screens that kids in the back seats could watch. (Apple had not invented the iPad yet.) The Oklahoma legislator in question proposed a law that would make it illegal to play pornographic videos on those screens. Why? Because children traveling in vehicles near the porn-showing vehicle might accidentally see (through the windows) what was on that screen!
Why is that relevant here? Because the whole point of the exercise was to portray those who opposed the bill as "being OK with kids seeing pornography." Larger, general principles of freedom and privacy are irrelevant when one can frame the story as "Dems want your kids to be exposed to smut."
In the context of prison, the government has -- or ought to have -- a greater responsibility to take care of the needs of people from whom it has seized the freedom to choose. Prisoners in the US receive inadequate health care in general, and in the extremely rare cases where they do receive gender-affirming care, it is only after their situation is deemed medically necessary and urgent that they receive even the minimum amount of care. Because they are in prison, "taxpayer dollars" will necessarily be used to pay for the minimal amount of care that they do receive.
Harris's answer to that question in 2019, then, says that the uniquely powerless people whom we as a society hold in prison should at least be treated equally among themselves. Minimal and inadequate care is the shameful norm in US prisons, but there is no reason why some prisoners should have it even worse than everyone else.
There is no end to this type of dishonest framing. We could, for example, ask Harris if she would try to collect income taxes on a gift to a lesbian, Muslim non-citizen who is in prison, and Harris would say no. Why? Because Section 102 of the Internal Revenue Code exempts gifts from recipients' gross incomes. Every recipient's. But the framing is everything, and more importantly, the fact-checkers would deem the claim that "Harris won't collect income taxes on gifts to imprisoned Muslim lesbians" to be True.
Even so, the disgusting dishonesty of Trump and his people is politically potent, and they know it. If they can find a situation that checks any of their culture-war boxes, they are happy. This one checks several of those hateful boxes (anti-LGBTQ+ bigotry, thirst for retribution against criminals, and targeting "illegal aliens"), so of course Trump ran with it. Even the most cleaned-up version of the attack on Harris traffics in blind hatred, but Trump made it much worse by saying that Harris had suddenly and explicitly decided that she wants to do controversial things for vilified people in an unpopular setting. Quite the trifecta.
Example 3: The pet-eating thing. Although I mentioned this one in my review of the non-debate, I did so only in passing, which means that I failed to foresee the importance of what turned out to be the biggest story of that night. Sadly, however, this one has not only an origin story but a reprehensible new life of its own, thanks to Trump and J.D. Vance.
As everyone now knows, the story began with a Facebook post (a post that has now been taken down) and was fed by neo-Nazi lies about Haitian refugees who had been legally resettled in Springfield, Ohio. If it had ended there, this would be the least worrisome of the three examples that I am discussing here, because as insane as it was, there would have been minimal harm if Trump had simply dropped it and moved on. Instead, however, Trump continues to lie about it, and Vance is now saying that the end justifies the means, because when he makes up stories like this, he can force the media to address "real problems" like immigration.
Similarly, when a reporter asked Trump to comment on the horrifying threats that people in Springfield (Haitian refugees and other citizens alike) are facing, Trump blithely responded that the "real threat" is at the Mexican border. Again, Trump managed to take something that he had seen or heard in the fever swamps and then garble the story into something even more outrageous. As in the other two examples, he trafficked in lies and othering. But now, even when people who Trump thinks of as "real Americans" -- White Christians in a small town in Republican-dominated rural Ohio -- are in physical danger because of his incitement, he cannot even pretend to care.
The practical lesson that I take from all of this is that I should no longer assume that even Trump's craziest utterances are offhand fantasies or unplanned trips to LaLa Land. No explanation is too cynical, and there is no bottom. He will listen to the most evil people he can find and then spread an extra layer of his own special derangement on whatever they tell him.
The larger lesson is that even the most vile lies and distortions are not below Trump and have not alienated his supporters, including Republicans in the US House and Senate. It has become commonplace to say that this is the most important election in American history, and we learn every day that that is even more true than we thought possible. The stakes in this election could not be higher.