President Trump is worried that his Republican Congress could be wiped out this coming Tuesday so in a last-ditch effort to scare up some GOP votes he’s dialing his racist rhetoric up to a ten. He and his right-wing media surrogates have been whipping up hysteria over the migrant caravan nonstop and yesterday his fearmongering lost any remaining trace of subtlety when he shared a video of an undocumented immigrant murderer on Twitter.
In the video, Luis Bracamontes, a man who was convicted of murdering two deputies in California laughs about the killings. As he grins and celebrates his crimes, “Democrats let him into our country” is superimposed along with dramatic sound effects.
“Democrats let him stay” pops up soon after, intercut with footage of the migrant caravan. “Who else would Democrats let in?” the video asks viewers to contemplate, before insisting that Trump and the GOP are “Making America safe again.”
It is outrageous what the Democrats are doing to our Country. Vote Republican now! https://t.co/0pWiwCHGbh pic.twitter.com/2crea9HF7G
— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) October 31, 2018
Unfortunately for the Republicans, the record tells a very different story. As reported by The Daily Beast Bracamontes was deported in 1997 under the Clinton administration for drug charges. He reentered the United States in 2001, under the Bush administration.
In other words, Democrats in power got rid of him and Republicans in power let him back in. He was then deported again and returned again in 2002, again under Bush, and proceeded to get married to an American, cementing his stay.
Bracamontes committed the murders in 2014 under the Obama administration, at which point he had already been kicked out under Democrats and Republicans. Furthermore, he killed the sheriffs with an AR-15, a weapon frequently used in mass shootings that was made available for public purchase by the Republican Bush administration’s repeal of the assault weapons ban.
The video Trump shared conveniently omits this detail, because the intent is not to honestly discuss Bracamontes’s crimes, but rather to neatly package him to attack the Democrats.
These murders are monstrous, but the depraved actions of this one man have nothing to do with having Democrats in power or with the thousands of people fleeing US-sponsored violence and poverty in their home countries.
Trump’s attempt to tie them together is deeply dishonest and a transparent scheme to scare white voters into supporting the Republican Party. The only response to such mendacity is to hold him and his enablers accountable and vote them out of power immediately.
Original reporting by Michael Daly at the Daily Beast.
