CHATTANOOGA, Tenn. — President Trump is painting an astonishingly apocalyptic vision of America under Democratic control in the campaign’s final days, unleashing a torrent of falsehoods and portraying his political opponents as desiring crime, squalor and poverty.
As voters prepare to render their first verdict on his presidency in Tuesday’s midterm elections, Trump is claiming that Democrats want to erase the nation’s borders and provide sanctuary to drug dealers, human traffickers and MS-13 killers. He is warning that they would destroy the economy, obliterate Medicare and unleash a wave of violent crime that endangers families everywhere. And he is alleging that they would transform the United States into Venezuela with socialism run amok.
Trump has never been hemmed in by fact, fairness or even logic. The 45th president proudly refuses to apologize and routinely violates the norms of decorum that guided his predecessors. But at one mega-rally after another in the run-up to Tuesday’s midterm elections, Trump has taken his no-boundaries political ethos to a whole new level — demagoguing the Democrats in a whirl of distortion and using the power of the federal government to amplify his fantastical arguments.
In Columbia, Mo., the president suggested that Democrats “run around like Antifa” demonstrators in black uniforms and black helmets, but underneath they have “this weak little face” and “go back home into Mommy’s basement.”
In Huntington, W.Va., Trump called predatory immigrants “the worst scum in the world,” but alleged that Democrats welcome them by saying, “Fly right in, folks. Come on in. We don’t care who the hell you are, come on in!”
And in Macon, Ga., he charged that if Democrat Stacey Abrams is elected governor, she would take away Second Amendment right to bear arms — though as a state official she would not have the power to change the Constitution.
Unmoored from reality, Trump has at times become a false prophet, too. He has been promising a 10-percent tax cut for the middle class, though no such legislation exists. And he has sounded alarms over an imminent “invasion” of dangerous “illegal aliens,” referring to a caravan of Central American migrants that includes many women and children, is traveling by foot and is not expected to reach the U.S.-Mexico border for several weeks, if at all.
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