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The Swamp; or, Inside the Mind of Donald Trump

His orations about migrants are a pastiche of others' golden oldies.
Exhibit A: the lie that migrants are sent from prisons and mental
institutions.

Amid the vomitous fusillade

Donald Trump spewed at the now-infamous rally thrown by the "Buckeye
Values PAC" in Dayton, Ohio-before the bit about the "bloodbath" but
after the one about how he would "save our country" by releasing "those
unbelievable patriots" who assaulted the Capitol on January
6th-America's 45th president addressed a certain category of
migrants: the ones he wasn't sure one could even call people. He was
strikingly specific, citing 22 "who arrived from the Congo." He
pretended to address those 22 benighted souls: "Where are you from in
the Congo? What's your address?" He answered for them: "Prison."

Same, he said, with "these people" supposedly being sent by Central
American governments: "And I would do the same thing if I had prisons
that were teeming with MS-13 and all sorts of people that they've got
to take care of for the next 50 years ... We have so many people being
hurt so badly and being killed. They're sending their prisoners to see
us."

Suckers that we are, America just lets them in.

In another of his most famous recent rants-the "poisoning the blood"
one from last December in Reno-he puked something similar, with one
extra detail: that blood-poisoning hordes had also been sprung from
mental institutions-"all over the world, not just in South America."

These are surreal refrains, entirely invented, of course. But Donald
Trump, naturally, didn't invent them. Nobody ever accused the Donald
of being innovative in his xenophobia, or of having a steel-trap mind
(except himself, of course). However, regarding one very specific sort
of cognition, the guy's Mensa-worthy. When it comes to the history of
racial panics that happened during his adult lifetime, his brain is like
flypaper.

There was the time in the last year of his presidency, amid outbreaks of
violence during Black Lives Matter protests, when he promised: "When the
looting starts, the shooting starts." That was a memory he'd loosed
from round about 1967, when it was a slogan of Miami's racist police
chief Walter E. Headley. His onstage panegyrics

in the opening months of his 2016 presidential campaign cited the 1974
vigilante fantasy

**Death Wish**.

****("Today you can't make that movie because it's not politically
correct," he lamented. Wrong as usual. It was remade in 2018.)

And here's a deep cut I was gobsmacked to get to the bottom of. I was
researching the backstory of one of both Trump and his palavering
audience's favorite speech refrains, a fairy tale about Gen. John J.
Pershing as a role model for fighting Islamic terrorism. Trump would
explain how Pershing supposedly "caught 50 terrorists that did
tremendous damage and killed many people, and he took the 50 terrorists
and he took 50 men and he dipped 50 bullets in pig's blood ..."

What I discovered was a Snopes.com

article about the myth dated October 30, 2001. It was one of those
mega-forwarded emails that right-wing uncles used to send you and
everyone else in their address book back in those days. It concluded as
Trump did: "They let the 50th man go ... And for the next 42 years there
was not a single Muslim extremist attack anywhere in the world."

Got to hand it to the guy. Trump is a veritable Wikipedia of America's
racial id. As a historian of this stuff, he even gives me a run for my
money.

There's a backstory, too, to this business about foreign potentates
draining the contents of their prisons and mental institutions for the
United States to absorb. It's a fascinating piece of cultural history.
Al Pacino makes a cameo.

[link removed]

YOU CAN FIND THE STORY IN MORE DETAIL in my book

**Reaganland**. President Jimmy Carter had tendered an offer of better
relations with Cuba if Fidel Castro made moves to open up his society.
The strategy showed signs of success; early in 1980, Castro agreed to
let exiles return to the island to visit relatives, and to release some
political prisoners. As I wrote, "Unfortunately for Castro, flooding the
population with witnesses to their government's inadequacies served to
intensify resistance to his regime. So he opened a political safety
valve: he withdrew military guards from the Peruvian embassy. His
expectation was that a few hundred of the most determined regime critics
would take advantage of the sanctuary. Instead, more than ten thousand
Cubans from all walks of life quickly crowded into the compound."

Castro's response to

**that** was to declare that everyone rushing to leave were the "scum"
of Cuban society anyway, and good riddance.

Meanwhile, he ordered some subalterns to set sail for America from the
nearby port of Mariel. It was a dictator's dog whistle: Leave now, if
you want to. In Miami, Cuban Americans turned entrepreneurial,
chartering fishing craft to pick them up. The "Mariel boatlift" was on.
Jimmy Carter, in a tough fight for his own party's renomination
against Ted Kennedy, sought to pick up some Cold War brownie points with
voters with the declaration: "We'll continue to provide an open heart
and open arms to refugees seeking freedom from Communist domination."

Except that, as you may well know, for James Earl Carter, by 1980 no
good turn tended to go unpunished.

Seventy thousand migrants came, all told, far, far more than what either
Carter or Castro expected. Seeking to save face, Castro cleverly made
sure the exodus included a small number, less than 2 percent, who were
"criminals," which in the Cuban context mostly meant people jailed for
crimes like operating illegal side businesses to feed their families, or
trading in the black market. He implied the number was far higher.
Castro's message that he was sending America Cuba's "scum" took
hold-and not just on the political right.

**The**

**New York Times**headlined, "Retarded People and Criminals Are Included
in Cuban Exodus." The UPI provided a number: 200 prisoners (that would
be about 0.26 percent of those who arrived) were ("reportedly")
"hardened criminals."

Most had nowhere to go. The government began housing them in tent cities
at underused military bases, mostly in conservative states. A frantic,
racist reaction took shape, exactly parallel to the one four years
earlier when Vietnamese boat people had begun washing up on American
shores. Some citizens made the connection directly, including this one I
quoted in

**Reaganland**: "The president and the governor said when the Vietnamese
came out here that they were only going to stay a little while. Now they
live here, they've got our jobs. They've got our tax dollars."
Colorado's Democratic governor Richard Lamm, pledging that no Cuban
criminals would darken

**his**state's doorstep, sounded like a Great Replacement theorist:
"It seems to me the evidence is clear and overwhelming that Castro is
emptying out his prisons and mental institutions. I think this country
is sadly mistaken if we feel we can be the reservoir for all the
displaced people in the world. There are too many of them. The numbers
are overwhelming."

Long story short, the normal ratio of violent crimes one might expect to
be committed by any concentrated human population took place. But it was
reported nationally as a ferocious crime spree. Refugees languishing for
weeks in squalid tents inside Arkansas's Fort Chaffee stormed the
gates. Gov. Bill Clinton activated National Guard troops. Not enough,
apparently: A frightening picture of a mob of angry brown men crowding
their way down a thoroughfare made the papers nationwide. Around Fort
Chaffee, stores started selling out of ammunition. "Everyone knows
we're getting Cuba's trash," said one citizen with a shotgun on his
lap.

Things eventually calmed down. The

**Marielistas** integrated into American life, and the myth that they
represented the dregs of Cuban society would have faded, had popular
culture not intervened.

Ever seen the 1983 movie

**Scarface**? Remember the opening scene, in which four fearsome
gangsters ae sprung from a refugee camp in a deal cut with a Miami drug
lord? One of them, Pacino's Tony Montana, becomes the most terrifying
gangster the world has ever seen.

**That** was how the Mariel boatlift would be remembered by many
Americans. One certain American in particular. Dollars to donuts: When
Donald Trump starts spewing bile about migrants sprung from Third World
jails-"tougher than anybody we've got in the country ... in some
cases they're not people in my opinion"-the refrain running around
in his tiny brain is this:

"Say hello to my leeeeetle friend!!"

[link removed]

THE CUBAN BOATLIFT STORY HAS a Trumpian coda. Ronald Reagan often gets
credit, and deserves some, for his warm feelings toward Mexican
immigrants, even undocumented ones. In his opening campaign address in
1979 , he called for
"open borders." In a 1980 debate
during the Texas primary,
he and George H.W. Bush competed to one-up each other in welcoming.
Mexican immigrants. In 1986, Reagan signed an immigration reform that
granted amnesty
to
some three million.

His attitude toward others seeking refuge in the U.S., however, was
revealed in a searing 2022 book on the subject by historian Kristina
Shull called Detention Empire
. "Boat
people" from Haiti were treated with particular callousness. The point
person for this policy was a rising star in the Justice Department named
Rudolph Giuliani.

His job was twofold: peddling the lie that dictator Jean-Claude "Baby
Doc" Duvalier, a Cold War ally, was not oppressing anyone, so none was
eligible for refugee status; and supervising the construction of
internment camps to detain them, including at an abandoned missile base
in Florida ("a miserable place, surrounded by barbed wire, patrolled by
armed guards," a witness said
),
and a facility at Guantanamo Bay that later enjoyed a second life after
September 11.

Then, Cold War be damned, the Reagan administration got to work
politically weaponizing the Cuban migration too, which Attorney General
William French Smith called "an incursion."

Giuliani was enlisted point person for that "problem," too, saying in
one statement: "Those people are illegally in this country. They have no
right to be here, and we have a right to hold them for as long as we
have to, to protect the safety of the American people ... anyone that
presents a danger to the American citizens should remain confined. And
we will fight with any judge and take it to any court to keep it that
way."

He was rewarded for that yeoman service with the envied post as United
States Attorney for the Southern District of New York, and his political
career was on its way. It's been a long time coming, this Trump thing.
Never say that we were not warned.

______________________________________________________________________

Extra! Extra! Got Infernally Triangular questions you'd like to see
answered in a future column? Send them to [email protected]
.

~ RICK PERLSTEIN

Follow Rick Perlstein on Twitter ,
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