It hasn’t gotten as much attention as the “bloodbath” idiocy, but the media also distorted Trump’s comments about illegal immigrants at that Ohio rally. His riff is being portrayed as an attack on the humanity of illegal immigrants. Here is a representative report from the Washington Post, headlined, “Trump says some undocumented immigrants are ‘not people.’”
The story opens:
Former president Donald Trump ratcheted up his dehumanizing rhetoric against immigrants Saturday by saying that some who are accused of crimes are “not people.”
“I don’t know if you call them people,” he said at a rally near Dayton, Ohio. “In some cases they’re not people, in my opinion. But I’m not allowed to say that because the radical left says that’s a terrible thing to say.”
What the story leaves out is that Trump was talking about MS-13 gang members, and not even MS-13 gang members in this country. He was expanding on his common theme that foreign countries are supposedly emptying out their jails to send criminals here, and said he understands foreign leaders doing this, because otherwise they have to expend resources on jailing gang members and other criminals for decades.
(His comments begin around the 17:45 mark in this video.)
So, he wasn’t talking about undocumented immigrants “accused of crimes,” but criminals in foreign countries who have been found guilty of crimes so heinous that they have been put away for serious time, for “50 years,” as Trump put it at one point.
It wouldn’t have been difficult to include this context. It only would have required quoting a sentence or two prior to the quote the Washington Post used. As it is, the Post quote is not just out of context, it is described in an erroneous way.
This will be the coverage until November, with much more to come if Trump wins.