When Donald Trump came down that tacky golden escalator in his grotesque Fifth Avenue building on June 16, 2015, to the half-hearted applause of a group of paid actors, he had a lot of incoherent, half-baked things to say in announcing his seemingly unlikely campaign for president. But his most quoted utterance of that day, ostensibly about Mexican immigrants, turned out to be a fair and accurate preview about what he would offer America as Republican candidate and then president:

When Mexico sends its people, they’re not sending their best. They’re not sending you. They’re not sending you. They’re sending people that have lots of problems, and they’re bringing those problems with [sic] us. They’re bringing drugs. They’re bringing crime. They’re rapists.

Many more Americans now believe Trump's xenophobic claims that immigrants are “bringing” the drugs and the crime and the rape, as well as taking more public assistance and perhaps creating hundreds of thousands of new Democratic voters. None of those claims are true.

When a pathologically insecure and vindictive person warns about bad things (as in, “He’s a terrible guy!” and “Democrats are destroying the country”), it is generally because he’s unconsciously making admissions about himself. To use the technical term, it's psychological projection.

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In other words, when Trump derides someone or something, or fear-mongers about an imagined threat, he’s basically talking about himself. He's revealing his fears, his insecurities and his plans for vengeance at not being treated as he believes is his due. Trump-watchers have understood this for decades, and much of the country has learned it over the last eight or nine years.

Most Americans and sensible people around the world quickly came to understand who was bringing the crime. More recently, we have seen definitive evidence that he was also bringing the drugs. As a New York jury determined last year, Donald Trump also committed a sexual assault that would be understood, in ordinary language, as rape.

As first reported in Rolling Stone, Trump’s White House was awash in drugs, mostly amphetamines,........

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