Political Memes

I don’t think he actually thinks that, I think it’s just that he is simple-minded and once he makes a concrete connection between concepts he’s unable to stop using it.

In his 2016 campaign, his advisers were pushing him to focus on immigration reform. They had policies that would make it harder for people to illegally immigrate (and legally, tbh), and they figured that would be a winning issue with republican voters. But Trump couldn’t stay on script, and kept neglecting to talk about immigration. So his advisors told him that the policies would be “like a wall” that stopped border crossings. “The wall” was supposed to be a mental image to remind him to discuss immigration. But Trump is too literal-minded, and starts just talking about the wall. The rest is history.

As stupid as that sounds for him, what's even worse for me is that he is trying to make the case that all immigration in America is essentially criminals and insane asylum monsters. Even when he knows full well he himself married several immigrants, he comes from immigrant families, his kids have immigrant mothers, and so on.

He's trying to tell a nation built by immigrants that immigrants are all criminals and monsters.