Did Donald Trump Confuse a Fictional Movie Plot with Actual Border Security Concerns?

Rachel Maddow argues that yes, he sure did

By Lindsay Thomaston  |  January 29, 2019 | 12:33pm
Photo by Alex Wong/Getty
Politics News Donald Trump
Did Donald Trump Confuse a Fictional Movie Plot with Actual Border Security Concerns?

President Trump has touted an array of talking points to argue the case for his telltale border wall, each point presenting varying degrees of…credibility. Now, Rachel Maddow has pointed out that some of his latest claims on border security might just be the stuff of fiction—literally.

Earlier this month, amid what grew to be the longest government shutdown in American history, Trump marveled at the efficiency of vehicles used by sex traffickers while defending his border wall campaign at a White House event. “[They] have unbelievable vehicles. They make a lot of money. They have the best vehicles you can buy,” said Trump. He went on to argue that their vehicles are “stronger, bigger and faster” than any transportation used by police, ICE and Border Patrol, sounding not at all unlike one of his closest political confidants, Kanye West.

According to Trump, traffickers use these supercars to transport women and children across the border, typically blindfolded and bound with duct tape. The only issue with that claim? The consistent revelation that border security has no idea what he is talking about.

“I think his statements are completely divorced from reality,” said Ashley Huebner, the associate director for legal services at the National Immigrant Justice Center. “That’s not a fact pattern that we see.”

The place where those occurrences aren’t so divorced from reality? A 2015 film titled Sicario, in which traffickers use advanced cars to smuggle their taped and tethered victims across the border, as Rachel Maddow pointed out on air Monday night. The film coincidentally also features a scene with Muslim prayer rugs in the southern desert, a detail which recently became another questionable asset in Trump’s grab bag of border wall belligerency.

“Now in any normal administration it would be insane to suggest…even joke about the president of the United States seeing stuff in a movie…and maybe thinking it was real, or at least real enough to justify an actual military deployment of thousands of active duty U.S. troops to the border,” Maddow said. “Could that actually happen in real life? I don’t know.”

Watch Maddow’s segment in full below.

 
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