Horror as fiction and fact

Donald Trump is the Stephen King* of presidents. He traffics in terror, horror and suspense.

Immigrants have gotten a triple dose of this treatment, although it’s the president’s style generally, from North Korea to how he deals with the members of his Cabinet and staff.

There are big differences between Trump and King, however. King’s work is make-believe, literature, entertainment. He makes readers happy by scaring the hell out of them. King is good at what he does. He has made tons of money the old-fashioned way, through honest hard work. As far we know, King is a decent person.

You can’t say any of those things about President Trump, although many of the things he says are make-believe. But King does not try to pass his writing as anything but fiction, and those frightened or hurt in his novels are imagined characters. Those scared and hurt by Trump are breathing, living people with families who suffer, and bleed, and die. Horror is King’s literary genre, and he is its Master.

Horror is for Trump a political tool, a strategy of deterrence. Trump’s terror and horror are real. The crime novel is a literary genre. True crime is a different genre. King works in literary horror. Trump deals in literal horror. His genre is true horror.

Terror. The raids of immigrant households Trump unleashed are meant to sow serious fear among men, women, and children who are neither criminals nor threats to national security. Trump augments the level of fear through the element of suspense. Will or will he not implement the massive dragnet and mass deportation he has been threatening for weeks?

Trump enjoys playing with the fears of the vulnerable, especially brown immigrants, and he seems to get a real kick in messing with their heads. It’s all a kind of game for him, a very cruel one. He toys with immigrants the way cats like to play with mice. But it’s a game only for one of the players, the one with the claws. For the other it’s torture.

Horror is how this administration is dealing with the latest immigration wave. Children kept indefinitely in prison-like conditions. Or worse. Even felons in actual prisons get to shower and have access to soap, toothpaste and clean clothes. Not the kids detained in some of these quasi-prisons. Many people who have been inside the camps have reported meeting children who have not bathed in weeks. When they leave work, some Border Patrol officers reek of the children’s odor. People in one community avoid them. The moral stench will last much longer than the odor.

This Wednesday morning, The Washington Post published a new report on a different horror: officer misconduct, including sexual abuse of children, at the Yuma, Arizona facility. The government knew about it since April. The media obtained official government records only recently.

Faced with a public outcry about his immigration policy, Trump responded in the usual way. The first line of defense, as usual, was to lie. These immigration jails are beautiful, clean and well-kept. Then a small step toward Trump’s real attitude. They may not be perfect but the conditions in the camps are much better than in the places from which the immigrants are coming, Trump said. And, if they don’t like it, don’t come.  Degree zero on the empathy scale. Classic Trump.

Trump’s reaction on this aligns with his views about the world, especially about poor countries. Even the horrible conditions described by reporters, members of Congress, lawyers, and the government’s own inspector generals are better than life in shithole countries.

Denial and faux indignation have been standard operating procedure for Trump, the Border Patrol, Homeland Security and other immigration enforcement agencies. Anything except regret, contrition, or change in the underlying policy. Some agents, such as the chief of the Border Patrol’s El Paso sector, are known to have hardline views on immigration and to run their facilities accordingly. In my extensive reading of the press on the immigration question, I have yet to come across a report of any immigration officer being fired or otherwise disciplined for their treatment of immigrants.

Far from being chastised by the firestorm of criticism in this country and globally, far from changing course after losing case after case in court, the Administration never tires of cooking up new schemes to frighten immigrants, and not just undocumented ones. Trump has pursued vigorously an attempt to add a question on citizenship status to the 2020 Census. This is a sneakier and Machiavellian a move, if less brutal, than the rest of the Administration’s immigration policy. By using fear to dissuade immigrants, including lawful residents, from participating in the Census, the Administration aims to reduce representation in Congress for communities with large immigrant populations and deny them some federal monies thus making these locations less attractive to immigrants.

I recently read my first Stephen King novel and it was better and more fun than I expected. Watching the actions of the Trump administration is a lot scarier and much less fun than reading Stephen King.

* Stephen Edwin King is an American author of horror, supernatural fiction, suspense, science fiction, and fantasy novels.