Follow this authorDana Milbank's opinions
FollowTrump Media is sounding more and more like the Trump presidency.
I thought about the Trump stock bubble while watching the former president and presumptive GOP nominee address adoring supporters on Tuesday here in Green Bay, where he held his first rally in 17 days. In a sense, what he did with Trump Media was just a variation on what he does to his supporters every day, whether convincing them to buy Trump-endorsed Bibles and sneakers, or selling them on election lies and white nationalism.
Three thousand die-hard Trump fans had come to the convention center to see him in the teeth of a winter storm that dumped up to a foot of snow on northern Wisconsin. In their rapturous reception for the “real president,” as election-denying pillow magnate Mike Lindell called Trump during a warm-up speech, I saw the kind of unshakable faith in a man that could lead someone to invest hard-earned money in a worthless company.
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And Trump was, as always, rewarding their adoration by selling them one self-interested swindle after another.
He announced that he had won his fraud case in New York: “The appellate division said, ‘You won the case, that’s it.’” (The court has not yet heard his appeal of the fraud judgment against him.)
He also announced that “it came out that we won this state” in 2020. (Trump lost Wisconsin by 20,682 votes.)
At the heart of the speech was his original swindle, and still his go-to scam: convincing his supporters that their lives were being destroyed by dark-skinned invaders. It was the story of how “Crooked Joe and his migrant armies of dangerous criminals” are producing a “bloodbath” among innocent, native-born Americans.
It’s not the least bit true. Homicide and violent crime, after rising during the pandemic, have dropped for two straight years and are lower than during Trump’s final year in office. There is scant evidence that immigrants — legal or undocumented — commit more than their share of crime, and a lot of evidence that migrants are more law-abiding, as The Post’s Glenn Kessler has detailed.
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But that doesn’t stop Trump from talking about the “massive crime” brought by “[President] Biden’s flood of illegal aliens” — the theme of his Green Bay rally and an earlier event in Grand Rapids, Mich. “They’re not humans. They’re not humans. They’re animals,” Trump said. “I’ll use the word ‘animal’ because that’s what they are.”
If Trump wasn’t suggesting that all immigrants are animals, the nuance was easily lost. “Trump Calls Migrants ‘Animals’ in Michigan Stop,” was the headline on Trump-friendly Newsmax.
He blamed migrants for “coming into our country with contagious diseases.” He warned of “illegal alien criminals crawling through your windows and ransacking your drawers,” where they “loot the jewelry.” When migrants aren’t busy doing that, they’re fixing to “obliterate Medicare and Social Security” and fill schools with “new migrant students who don’t speak a word of English.”
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To illustrate the fictitious wave of “migrant crime,” Trump, at his stops in Michigan and Wisconsin, cited violent crimes committed by undocumented immigrants. (“Last week, another illegal alien criminal was arrested in Alabama for raping a mentally incapacitated 14-year-old girl.”)
You could just as easily cherry-pick from police blotters to make it appear as though there’s a crime wave being perpetrated by evangelical Christians, or Trump supporters — and it would be just as dubious.
But it suits his purposes to frame migrants, because “they’re coming from places that you don’t want them to come from,” as Trump put it. “They’re coming from the Congo, Yemen, Somalia, Syria,” he said at another point. “They’re country-changing, country-threatening and they’re country-wrecking. They’re destroying our country.”
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To reverse this “invasion,” he told the Green Bay crowd, which was almost entirely White, “we’re going to end up with the largest deportation in American history.” It was one of the biggest applause lines of the night.
Even before Trump took the stage, the audience had been primed to fear the invaders.
“In Joe Biden’s America, he has a VIP program, and it’s for illegal aliens,” Rep. Tom Tiffany (R-Wis.) told them. “And you are the second-class citizens in America now, aren’t you?”
Another Wisconsin Republican, Rep. Glenn Grothman, posed this question: “Who is the only man who has the ability to stop the United States from disappearing in November?”
“Trump!” people yelled.
“You’re absolutely right,” the congressman confirmed.
And, so, the fearful masses buy in. Watching Trump sell his swindle about migrants, it occurred to me that those suckered by the Trump Media IPO got a better deal, relatively speaking. Those who bought “DJT” shares lost only their shirts. But those who have been snookered into seeing migrants as diseased animals have lost part of their souls.
On Good Friday, Trump posted on social media an image showing Biden with his hands and feet tied in the bed of a pickup truck.
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On Easter Sunday, he fired off a 168-word, run-on sentence attacking his perceived enemies, including “‘DERANGED’ JACK SMITH, WHO IS EVIL AND ‘SICK’” and “CROOKED JOE’S DOJ THUGS.”
Also in observance of Easter, Trump spokeswoman Karoline Leavitt issued a statement attacking the White House for blocking “religious egg designs for their Easter Art Event.” But it turned out Trump did the same thing during his presidency, as did every other president for the last half-century.
Monday, the judge in Trump’s hush-money trial, Juan Merchan, expanded a gag order because of Trump’s repeated false attacks against Merchan’s daughter. Merchan said Trump’s attacks on “family members of presiding jurists and attorneys” were “a direct attack on the rule of law.” Trump responded by posting a Fox News clip of others attacking the judge’s daughter.
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So much to be proud of! No wonder Rep. Guy Reschenthaler of Pennsylvania, a member of House GOP leadership, has sponsored H.R. 7845, “to designate the Washington Dulles International Airport in........