U.S. President Donald Trump is obsessed with using Twitter for messaging. Lately — following former Fox News exec Bill Shine coming on board at the White House — he’s taken to posting short video messages. These messages echo the incendiary rhetoric he posts in his tweets that have actual text.
In a video message posted Wednesday, he said:
‘Nancy Pelosi and the Democrats want to abolish the brave men and women of ICE [Immigration and Customs Enforcement]. What I want to do is abolish the killers in ISIS, and you know who’s going to win? We are.’
Watch below.
— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) August 22, 2018
What? Does he think it’s clever — or something — to say that Democrats want to “abolish the brave men and women of ICE”? How does one abolish people? Who is responsible for the structure of that sentence?
After that claim, he asserts that he wants to “abolish the killers in ISIS,” which almost certainly represents some sort of attempt at cleverness considering the parallels in phrasing.
It’s ironic for him to treat dealing with ISIS as a future item on the agenda considering past assertions from his administration that the terrorist group was essentially dealt with. In late December, press secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders wrongly asserted, for instance, that the group had been defeated — not pushed back, but defeated.
That Trump administration attitude left actual forces on the ground, including some Kurdish allies, struggling to find their footing in the Middle East. In the time since, the Pentagon has shared an assessment that suggests the group is “well positioned to rebuild and work on enabling its physical caliphate to re-emerge.”
Trump’s already made his preferred modus operandi for dealing with ISIS terrorists clear in the past, asserting that he wants to “bomb the hell out of them” and even kill their families, too.
Is he suggesting, then, that Democrats want to kill ICE employees? That can’t be what he actually has in mind, but it’s what’s at the end of the metaphorical path his latest word salad establishes.
On that note, House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi (D-CA) doesn’t even want to abolish ICE. He’s just lumping all Democrats into the same boat that a simple Google search can easily reveal they’re not all in.
Some Democrats have called for the agency to be abolished, yes. Senator Kirsten Gillibrand (D-N.Y.), for instance, said at one point:
‘I believe that ICE has become a deportation force… and that’s why I believe you should get rid of it, start over, reimagine it and build something that actually works.’
Note, though, that it’s not as though she’s calling for some sort of immigration free-for-all. She and others ideologically aligned with her just want a system that respects the humanity of the people involved to a greater degree than they feel the current one does.
Trump continuously casts Democrats as dedicated to “open borders” no matter the consequences although that’s not at all the point of the vast majority of their arguments. He latches onto that idea and ignores the actual point, though. Fear mongering is a large part of how he rose to power and he’s not, apparently, about to abandon it now.
Featured Image via Screenshot from the Video
