Donald Trump Is Becoming Increasingly Unhinged on Immigration

His speech to the Republican convention reached new levels of incomprehensibility.

Donald Trump arrives to accept his party's nomination on the last day of the 2024 Republican National Convention at the Fiserv Forum in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, on July 18, 2024. (Photo by ANGELA WEISS/AFP via Getty Images)

THE NEWS HAS MOVED SO FAST over the past few weeks that Donald Trump has gotten away with some insanity that makes his past outrages look almost sensible. Among the most unhinged claims in the disjointed litany of terribles that spewed from his mouth as he accepted the GOP nomination was this doozy:

Venezuela, Caracas, high crime, high crime. Caracas, Venezuela, really a dangerous place. But not anymore, because in Venezuela, crime is down 72 percent. In fact, if they would ever in this election, I hate to even say that, we will have our next Republican convention in Venezuela because it will be safe. Our cities, our cities will be so unsafe we won’t be able, we will not be able to have it there.

What the hell was he talking about? It’s hard to follow what passes for evidence and logic in Trump’s mind, but his reasoning seems to be that if you lock up a huge portion of your population, you’ll solve your crime problem. In that vein, Trump ranted on about El Salvador—which he chose not to name, referring only to “a certain country, and I happen to like the president of that country very much.” Since President Nayib Bukele took office in 2019, he’s prosecuted a relentless campaign against the gangs that had made many parts of El Salvador a lawless wasteland in recent years. But Trump wasn’t exactly complimenting Bukele for implementing a state of emergency in 2022 that has seen tens of thousands of arrests—he sees in it a plot against America. Trump claims Bukele isn’t really locking up the criminals, “he’s sending all of his criminals, his drug dealers, his people that are in jails, he’s sending them all to the United States.”

It’s worth looking at Trump’s outrageous invasion fantasies in depth—and the media, in general, does little to counter the craziest of them. He repeats them so often they become a mantra: We’re being invaded by would-be Hannibal Lecters. X country (fill in any Latin American, Caribbean or African nation you like) is sending criminals, murderers, rapists, and insane asylum inmates to our southern border, and the Biden administration is letting them in to wreak havoc, steal jobs, “killing hundreds of thousands of people a year.” The media fact-checks Trump with anodyne comments that immigrants commit crimes at lower rates than the American born—which is certainly true but doesn’t fully call out the danger of Trump’s dark obsession.

Since 2015, Trump has claimed that other countries “send” their worst to our borders. Again and again, Trump asserts that Mexico is “not sending their best,” but, with few exceptions, countries don’t send people to the United States. Immigrants come here of their own free will because they see America more in Ronald Reagan’s image of “a shining city on a hill” than Donald Trump’s dystopian vision of American carnage.

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BUT WHAT ABOUT TRUMP’S specific claims that Venezuela and El Salvador have experienced a big drop in crime because they are pushing their criminals to flee north? Venezuelan murders are down, but nothing like Trump’s 72 percent figure, which fact checkers have been unable to track to a reliable source. The government itself hasn’t reported numbers on murders or robberies in ten years, but the Venezuelan Observatory of Violence Social Sciences Laboratory has published a well-regarded study on violence in the country. The group found a 25 percent drop in violent deaths in Venezuela in 2023 compared to the previous two years. But homicides declined by relatively little compared to deaths by police action and the largest category, “deaths under investigation,” which may include the large numbers of extrajudicial killings that happen in Venezuela, as in so many other brutal authoritarian states.

El Salvador has experienced a bigger drop in violent crime—last year, according to the government, murders were down nearly 70 percent. (Maybe Trump confused Venezuela and El Salvador?) But Bukele has achieved that impressive drop not just by incarcerating 2 percent of his population—the highest rate in the world, using tactics that have brought widespread condemnation—but by buying off some of the country’s most powerful gangs, including MS-13, whose branches in the United States are responsible for murders, human trafficking, and a host of other crimes.

Of course, this is all giving Trump too much credit. He seems, based on his convention speech, to have no idea what’s going on in El Salvador at all. He began his discussion of El Salvador—or at least, it was probably El Salvador, but he never actually named the country he was thinking of—by riffing on the “late, great Hannibal Lecter.” He continued:

They’re emptying out their insane asylums. And terrorists at numbers that we’ve never seen before. Bad things are going to happen.

Meanwhile, our crime rate is going up, while crime statistics all over the world are going down. Because they’re taking their criminals and they’re putting them into our country. A certain country, and I happen to like the president of that country very much, but he’s been getting great publicity because he’s a wonderful shepherd of the country.

He says how well the country’s doing because their crime rate is down. And he said he’s training all of these rough people. They’re rough, rough, rough. He’s training them. And I’ve been reading about this for two years. I think, “Oh that’s wonderful, let’s take a look at it.” But then I realize he’s not training them; he’s sending all of his criminals, his drug dealers, his people that are in jails, he’s sending them all to the United States. And he’s different in that he doesn’t say that.

There’s very little we can be certain of here. Is Trump confused, as some commentators have recently suggested, about the fact that the word “asylum” has different meanings in different contexts? Does he know for sure that Hannibal Lecter is a fictional character? (Recall that back in 2019, Trump apparently confused the movie Sicario 2 with reality.) Or is Trump’s brain just stuck, as it so often is, in 1980: Fidel Castro (also “late, great”?) did send some mental patients and hardened criminals to the United States among the 100,000 political asylees who fled during the Mariel Boatlift. It was an evil and clever bit of political warfare aimed at discrediting the Cuban ambitions for freedom. But there’s no evidence it’s happening now.

In any case, it’s not clear from Trump’s remarks whether he approves of Bukele or resents him or idolizes him or some combination. But the one thing that is clear is that Trump’s views have little if any bearing on reality, which is surprising for a candidate who appears to have built his whole campaign on the proposition that his opponent was mentally incapable of being president.

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NEITHER VENEZUELA NOR EL SALVADOR is releasing murderers, rapists, and other criminals and sending them to the United States. While Venezuelan migration is up, it’s driven by the collapse in the country’s economy and political repression. As for El Salvador, in May 2024, it ranks behind nine other countries of origin of those undocumented migrants Customs and Border Protection encounters trying to cross the southern border.

Trump will continue to lie about immigration—it’s worked for him in the past. But we can’t just ignore the vitriol he spews as if it’s normal.