The source of Donald Trump’s lurid descriptions of traffickers taping women’s mouths shut and driving them over the border may have been uncovered … and it sure wasn’t from Border Patrol leadership asking agents if they had seen anything like that. No, it’s a movie. A fictional—albeit, somewhat surprisingly, non-pornographic—one.
It’s not even just the tape fantasies that come from film:
No, seriously. As Rachel [Maddow] noted on the show last night, there’s a movie called Sicario: Day of the Soldado, which was released last summer, and which included a woman being tied up with tape, smugglers driving [f]ast vehicles, and officials finding prayer rugs in the dirt near the border.
There you have three of Trump’s key border-danger fantasies: tape (especially tape!), smugglers with “unbelievable vehicles,” and Muslims (who we’re supposed to believe are automatically terrorists) carrying prayer rugs all the way to the border and then getting careless with them. None of these stories reflect any serious reports of what’s going on at the border, but apparently Trump saw a movie. Or heard a synopsis of one, who can say. Either way, it was a fictional action movie, not a documentary.
Trump isn’t likely to quit using these fictions to promote his border wall—he really, really likes them, especially thinking about women with their mouths taped—but at least there’s finally a reality to point to when trying to figure out where he’s coming from. Bonus points to whoever can figure out which specific chunk of “executive time” he spent watching this movie.