War against a nonexistent threat

The following is an excerpt from a commentary by Jennifer Rubin published in The Washington Post.

The Post reports: “President Trump said Wednesday that he would deploy as many as 15,000 military personnel to the border with Mexico in response to caravans of Central American migrants making their way northward.”

Trump says he wants a “wall of people,” which sounds like something that would have been in vogue during the Middle Ages. We shouldn’t be even sending 5,000 troops.

Remember, we are talking about a shrinking caravan of mostly destitute women and children hundreds and hundreds of miles from our southern border. By comparison, the Mariel boatlift in 1980 brought nearly 125,000 Cubans to Florida — many of whom became stalwart Republicans.

Trump’s war against a nonexistent threat is so preposterous, and is such an obvious misuse of taxpayer dollars and an abuse of the military, that one wonders whether his anti-immigrant hysteria has reached the point of diminishing returns.

Trump’s insistence on demagoguing the issue, which was the impetus for the mail bomber and set off a shooting at a synagogue, underscores the degree to which his party is now an irrational nativist movement.

If you want to know why the Republican Party has repulsed so many former adherents, you need look no further than its xenophobic delusions which waste money, abuse the military, incite racism and violence, work to our economic disadvantage and violate our deepest held values.