After only one uneventful year in office (if you don't count disastrous and embarrassing events) Donald Trump is already focusing on 2020. It's the earliest launch of a reelection campaign that anyone can recall. For the most part he's using the guise of campaign as a slush fund to hold rallies that feed his insatiable ego. He craves the adoration of his glassy-eyed disciples, particularly considering his historically low approval ratings. And there is a fair chance he won't finish his first term if special counsel Robert Mueller comes through.
Trump just released a campaign ad (posted below) that mirrors his repulsive and bigoted personality perfectly. It begins with video of an alleged murderer spewing vulgarities. That may also be a first for an American political advertisement. But it gets worse. The ominous tone of an anxious narrator asserts that "President Trump is right" in his fetish to build a wall along the southern border that will solve nothing and won't be paid for by Mexico. The ad is rife with thinly veiled insinuations that all immigrants are scary brown foreigners with a lust for American blood. Trump offers himself up as the sole savior of our vulnerable families. And then he drops this reprehensible rhetorical bullshit:
"Democrats who stand in our way will be complicit in every murder committed by illegal immigrants."
Oh really? Trump is actually trying to lay the blame for random and heinous criminal activity on his political opponents. He's associating differences of opinion with complicity to murder. It's an absurd and unethical political attack that should be repudiated by his Republican peers. The logic of it is so weak that it, if anything, it blows up in his face. It's more consistent with his own support for white nationalists and neo-Nazis who commit far more crimes of violence than any immigrants. In fact, even undocumented immigrants commit fewer crimes than native born citizens.
The racism is not the least bit disguised. The entire premise of the ad is that monsters from south of the border are plotting to invade our country, break into our homes, and commit unspeakable atrocities. The words "Stop Illegal Immigration" appear on screen over video of two Latino men whose faces have been eerily blurred. Never mind that the men in the picture are not engaging in any crime or acting in any way threatening. Just their ethnicity is enough to signal danger in the minds of Trump and his Deplorables.
There is also a hint of totalitarianism in the ad's language that demands obedience on the part of Democrats, warning them not to "stand in our way." It's reminiscent of the threats leveled at German citizens who opposed Hitler's enforcers as he rose to power. And the consequences of standing in Trump's way are charges of murder, which have a penalty of death. The next step for the StormTrumpers would be to raid the homes of his perceived enemies, load them into freight cars, and deliver them to concentration camps. Don't think it can't happen here. That's what many Germans thought.