The decent into Orwellian madness continues…
At his most recent campaign rally, Donald Trump added a new line to his standard message. Unfortunately, it involved the president attacking a pending piece of legislation that exists only in his imagination.
“Every single Democrat in the U.S. Senate has signed up for the open borders – and it’s a bill. And it’s called The Open Borders Bill. What’s going on? And it’s written by – guess who – Dianne Feinstein.”
Trump’s lies come in a variety of types and styles, but the ones that alarm me the most are the lies in which he describes imaginary things as real. The president has an unnerving habit, for example, of telling people detailed information about conversations that simply did not occur in reality, though he seems convinced that they did.
This falls into the same broad category. There is no “Open Borders Bill.” Trump made it up. Sen. Dianne Feinstein (D-Calif.) has a bill to prohibit family separations at the border, and the proposal enjoys broad Democratic support, but no sane person would characterize that as an “open borders” policy. (The White House says it no longer supports family separations, either.)
When the lines between fact and fiction blur for the president, it’s unsettling.
But more broadly, Trump has also apparently convinced himself, not only that an imaginary bill is real, but also that he’s accurately describing the Democratic position on immigration policy.
To put it mildly, he isn’t
.