Trump Doesn't "Want Judges"

Last night, Donald Trump held another Make America Clap for Me Again rally in South Carolina, where he spent a good part of his time at the podium ranting about late-night talk show hosts and various other garbage. It will be his litany of grievances with the entertainment industry that gets the headlines (including the article from which I am quoting), but he said something rather more important than calling Jimmy Kimmel a talentless hack or whatever:

Yet all of Trump's musings about the pop-culture landscape paled in comparison to his continued airing of grievances regarding the U.S. judicial system. In claiming, dubiously, that an official came to him "three days ago" requesting an additional 5,000 judges "on the border," Trump asked, without a hint of irony, "What other country has judges?"

"I don't want judges," the president added, as the crowd roared. "I want ICE and border patrol agents."

The authors correctly note that Trump's meandering spleen-venting "paled in comparison" to the President of the United States bellowing that he doesn't "want judges," and yet these were the final two paragraphs in the piece, rather than the lede.

Again, I want to note that there was not actually an immigration crisis in the U.S. that warranted Trump's obsessive focus on the southern border. It's manufactured fear and straight-up lies, used to justify a nativist agenda which itself will serve only as precursor to a much broader and more comprehensive white supremacist authoritarian agenda.

That could not be clearer in Trump's comments. He wants to deny due process to immigrants, and he's expecting his base (and the rest of his cowardly, despicable party) to support that rank authoritarian move because he's nurtured their seething hatred of immigrants, who have been scapegoated as misdirection so the Republican Party can avoid accountability for their own reprehensible policies that have decimated jobs paying livable wages and offering benefits.

Trump won't stop there. If he is allowed to deny due process to immigrants along the southern border, citizens he doesn't like will be next.