2 Listen OpEdNews Op Eds 10/24/2018 at 11:29 AM EDT    H3'ed 10/24/18   With lie-filled "nationalist" war on caravan, transgender people, Trump moves U.S. toward tyranny By Will Bunch       (Page 3 of 6 pages) Become a premium member to see this article and all articles as one long page.   No comments

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November 6 by a point or two, which is the only thing that matters to Team Trump.

I'm old enough to remember when a super-controversial policy move was the kind of thing an administration would keep under wraps until after an election. Not so in 2018, when a leak to the New York Times (a call that almost surely was coming from inside the house ... the White House) revealed a Trump administration memo to redefine gender throughout the federal government to eliminate the very concept of "transgender" -- an erasure of as many as 1.4 million Americans that carries echoes of the erasure of ... well, do I really need to spell it out?

What happened next is exactly what all the president's minions wanted: Outrage. Protests by transgender Americans and their allies flooded the streets of Manhattan within hours of the Times report and moved to the gates of the White House on Monday -- generating hours of TV video of furious LGBTQ activists that will be surely be shown in a repeated loop on the Fox News Channel, thus raising the blood pressure of 71-year white grandpas who'll now be certain to leave their couch at 6 a.m. on November 6 to prevent an alliance of men in drag and Honduran refugees from assuming full power.

To hold his right-wing base together and drive them to the polls, Trump's weaponry includes such diverse elements as ... fear. Actually, that's pretty much the only element he's got -- fear -- and so he is turning up the volume to deafening levels. This is hardly a new political tactic -- remember the "ebola scare" of 2014 that vanished from the headlines as soon as a GOP midterm landslide was in the books? -- but the president is taking this to new depths, with his unfounded accusation that "unknown Middle Easterners" have infiltrated the migrant caravan or that Democrats are behind the whole thing.

A former Trump adviser named Barry Bennett told the Washington Post that the Central American caravan is in fact "a political gift" to the Republican Party, adding: "I wish they were carrying heroin. I wish we'd thought of it. It speaks to our dearth of creativity, unfortunately." But what Team Trump has accomplished -- by lumping the women who flooded the Senate corridors and elevators in a desperate bid to stop Kavanaugh to other protests against the president's intentionally divisive moves and calling it all "a Democratic mob" -- has been creative enough, apparently.

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Katie Sullivan @KatSulls

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