Them Damned Poster Boys

Donald Trump was using the fear of invasion by rapists, murderers and drug traffickers to crank up the crowd.

“But how do you stop these people?” he yelled.

“Shoot ’em.” A voice yelled back.

The president smiled and made a joke. The crowd roared in agreement. He had worked the red-hats into the rage he was looking for.

So then a guy who admires Donald Trump and echoes his ideas online, bought a tank of gas, drove to El Paso and shot immigrants dead.

He’ll spend the rest of his life expecting Donald Trump to reward him for following orders.

We Americans have the right and the responsibility to manage immigration into our country. Each of our past presidents has removed undocumented immigrants.

But for Donald Trump, it’s not enough to simply round up and deport. He needs to see the terror in immigrant eyes.

He’s been tweeting phony dates when mass deportations will be carried out — last Sunday was one of them — then he cancels the roundup. It is a torture meant to ratchet up the very real fear that families will be separated and loved ones will be lost.

Donald Trump brags to his followers that he has unlimited power to inflict cruel and unusual suffering on ‘those’ people.

Cruelty can undo a great nation.

Donald Trump has suggested he can shoot someone on Fifth Avenue and get away with it. He’s boasted he can grab women’s private parts whenever he pleases.

He’s not entirely wrong.

According to a policy cooked up in the Justice Department — by people whose continued employment depends on keeping a president in office and out of prison — he can’t be indicted.

That immunity, which started with Nixon, is nowhere in the Constitution. It’s not a law or a regulation. It’s the stuff of thin air.

Donald Trump has surrounded himself with another layer of Kevlar by hiring William Barr. Barr auditioned to be his attorney general by writing that his boss is above the law. They’ve conspired to stop investigations of obstruction of justice by accusing the CIA and FBI of plotting to overthrow the government.

More than seven hundred former federal prosecutors have signed a letter saying you and I would be indicted for doing the things Donald Trump has done.

The good news is that the Founders, in their wisdom, gave Congress the power to hold an unaccountable president accountable.

Not that long ago, a cult leader named Jim Jones persuaded more than 900 of his followers to commit suicide by drinking Kool-Aid or Flavor-Aid laced with potassium cyanide.

Parents poisoned their children, as rehearsed, then they poisoned themselves.

When you hear talk of “drinking the Kool-Aid,” it means buying into the rants and demands of a cult leader preaching doomsday versions of reality. It never ends well.

The similarities between Reverend Jones and Donald Trump are striking.

Jones convinced his followers that law enforcement and intelligence officials were coming to get him — not because of his crimes, he insisted, but because he alone dared to speak the truth.

And Donald Trump?

He wants his supporters to believe that career officials in the DOJ, CIA and FBI —  sworn to defend our democracy, including Republicans he appointed himself  — committed treason by investigating the Russian attacks that helped put him in office.

The accusations of treason he hopes we’ll swallow could trigger the death penalty. Donald Trump is mixing up a particularly poisonous batch of the Kool-Aid.