President Donald Trump thinks very highly of himself. This Friday, he participated in a roundtable event in Florida with Latino voters, and at one point, he compared himself to a “wall” — which is quite ridiculous, to put it lightly. Trump insisted that he is a metaphorical “wall” between the “American dream” and the “chaos” that would engulf the United States if Democratic presidential candidate Joe Biden is elected to the White House this November. The president’s comments are, quite simply, hollow fearmongering, which is what he has apparently been reduced to in the face of the actual chaos that has defined his own time in office so far.
Trump said:
‘I’ll tell you what, I’m like a wall. You know we’re building a wall on the southern border, it’s almost complete. But I’m like a wall between the American dream — I’ll say this because it sounds nice but it’s true — I’m like a wall between the American dream and chaos and then a horror show, a horror show, it would be very bad; it would be very bad.’
Trump then added something that sounded rather racist and patronizing, which seems like the president’s go-to modus operandi most of the time. He claimed that “the people that understand the border better than anybody are the Hispanics… because they don’t want bad people coming in to our country. They don’t want people coming in to our country that are going to take their jobs. They understand it better, and I always thought it would be the opposite, in a way.”
He’s pushing the idea that “Hispanics,” as a whole, are automatically associated with southern border policy, and not just that, but that they’re automatically associated with his particular border policy. Can they not just be Americans, without getting lumped into a group associated with campaigning against undocumented border crossings?
The comment that Trump made towards the end is even worse — not only is Trump automatically associating “Hispanics” with the southern border, he says he thought their perspective on the issue would be “the opposite” of his own. He is implying that he expected “Hispanics,” as a whole, to be in favor of few, if any border restrictions, which is how he tends to conceptualize the opposite of his own position. He’s suggesting that he previously equated Hispanics with border lawlessness. (The opposite of his own position isn’t, of course, actual lawlessness; it’s just decency. Still, that’s not what Trump presents.)
At the event, Trump also suggested that he would fare well in his upcoming debate with Biden because of the former vice president’s supposed lack of mental acuity. Trump’s consistent and repeated accusations that Biden is “weak” are baseless.
Check out Trump’s comments on the video below:
