Longacre: Trump trying to scare away voters

Donald Trump likes to scare people (see John Gartner on the role of sadism in malignant narcissism), and he likes to create enemies to be scared of. His attacks on Haitians in Springfield, Ohio, are a case in point. Haitians are simply representative of the awful immigrant “others” he has created. His bizarre lie that they are eating pets has had its intended effect: threats of violence against a peace-loving people.

Trump is always looking for a way to pin the blame for the immigrant “menace” on his opponent, Vice President Kamala Harris. Then, along came hurricanes Helene and Milton. Lying that Kamala had taken money away from the Federal Emergency Management Agency to give to immigrants, he created distrust on the part of storm victims, which helped generate threats of violence to individual emergency workers.

As for immigrants in general, Trump never tires of pointing to them, falsely, as responsible for all our problems (again, problems he has largely made up), from housing costs and unemployment to “skyrocketing” crime rates, and then declaring himself the only candidate bold enough to take care of the problem with dictatorial efficiency (mass roundups, detentions, deportations and, for his political opponents, special punishments).

But Trump is deceiving himself. He does not realize that he only gets one bite at the apple and that the majority — soon to be a vast majority — did not like the first bite enough to try for a second. His current strategy, if it can be called that, is to divide and conquer, no matter how many people get hurt. It is up to us, the voters, to get out there and to show Donald his future home, a prison cell.

Frederick Longacre

Hockessin

Reader reactions, pro or con, are welcomed at civiltalk@iniusa.org.