When Donald Trump sat down with Sharyl Attkisson for his latest conservative media interview, the former president largely stuck to his usual rhetoric about immigrants. “We’re not a dumping ground,” the Republican said. “We’re going to get all of those people out, and we’re going to get them out fast.”
But there was a point in the appearance when the GOP nominee used a phrase he doesn’t usually include in his anti-immigrant talking points. Politico’s report flagged it:
Trump said that it will be easy to round up foreign criminals in America because the local police know of them and know ‘their serial numbers.’”
I’ve seen a handful of reports suggesting that Trump opened the door to assigning serial numbers to immigrants, but I’ve watched the full context, and that’s not quite right. Rather, Trump suggested that as far as he’s concerned, immigrants already have serial numbers.
What’s more, Trump is under the impression that law enforcement officials at the local level have access to some kind of lists that include both the immigrants’ names and “their serial numbers.”
The Republican candidate has made similar assumptions before. In fact, way back in August 2016, Trump sat down with Fox News and made a series of boasts about his deportation plans, some of which now sound familiar.
“We are going to get them out,” the future president told then-host Bill O’Reilly. “And the police know who they are. They are known by law enforcement who they are. We don’t do anything.”
In other words, as Trump saw it eight years ago, police departments — responsible for protecting communities and cities of varying sizes — were fully aware of which of their neighbors were in the country illegally, but local officers simply didn’t do anything about it.
That didn’t make any sense, though at the time, the Republican — the first major-party nominee to have literally no background in public service — knew effectively nothing about how his country’s government works.
Eight years later, Trump has a presidential term under his belt — and he’s still confused.
For the record, local police departments are not sitting on lists of undocumented immigrants (and “their serial numbers”) awaiting word from the Oval Office to take action. There are no such lists; there are no such numbers.
The fact that the GOP nominee doesn’t fully understand this is both remarkable and unsettling.