Donald Trump launched his political career in June 2015 with a brazen and bogus appeal to American fear, based on a distortion that immigrants to this country bring us only crime and mayhem.

Now, more than nine years later ‒ having won and lost the presidency ‒ Trump is still peddling the same old lies about why people come to this country while asking Americans to return him to the White House. After all this time, he's still just slinging the same-old, same-old slop.

Trump blends disinformation about the country's crime rate with anecdotal details about individual offenses involving migrants who entered this country illegally to produce a twisted fiction that we’re all under siege at all times from invaders. In this false narrative, Trump casts himself as the only person who can save us.

That noxious brew of narcissism and nativism has proved to be appealing to some in those nine years. But there are plenty of studies that debunk the notion that migrants increase our crime rate.

Trump would never let the truth get in the way of a scary story.

Here's a little news that directly conflicts with Trump's claims about immigration: After a series of surges in illegal crossings at America's southern border, apprehensions of migrants there in July dropped to the lowest level during the Biden administration.

But good news doesn't serve Trump's fearmongering campaign for power. So he went to Arizona on Thursday and stood near the border, where he claimed that President Joe Biden and Vice President Kamala Harris had "unleashed a deadly plague of migrant........

© USA TODAY