Cerabino: Trump calling immigrants cannibals is just a taste of what's to come

Donald Trump is running out of ways to demonize the migrants coming to the southern border to file asylum claims.

When he first announced his presidential campaign during the summer of 2015, Trump complained that “Mexico was not sending their best.”

“They're sending people that have lots of problems,” Trump said.

“They're bringing drugs. They're bringing crime. They're rapists. And some, I assume, are good people.”

It seemed like harsh fear-mongering at the time.

But now it somehow doesn’t sound scary enough. Calling border arrivals “people with problems” and rapists sprinkled among good people almost seems like a Trump compliment.

That’s because his need to create escalating levels of fear over migrants is a bottomless pit.

He’s like a drug addict who eventually requires a stronger dose to achieve the highs he craves.

Warning about rapists is just not going to do it anymore. It has lost its currency, especially from the mouth of a guy who has his own personal history with sexual assault.

We need a bigger scare.

So, this week, while Trump was safely ensconced inside Mar-a-Lago, a place that relies heavily on immigrant labor, he upped the ante on border crossers by calling them human cannibals released from mental institutions.

“You know insane asylums. That’s Silence of the Lambs stuff,” Trump said.

“Hannibal Lecter, anybody know Hannibal Lecter?” Trump asked his audience.

He was referring to a fictional character from a fictional movie.

What he was doing would be akin to warning drivers on I-95 to look out for Lord Humungus, the hockey-mask-wearing leader of a biker gang from the Mad Max 2: Road Warrior movie.

So, we’ve made the leap from “people with problems, rapists, and some good people” to human cannibals invading our border.

Forget the worries about immigrants “coming for our jobs.” Because now they’re “coming for our flesh.”

You’d think that when you reach this cannibal stage of demonization, you’ve run out of ways to scare people with lies.

But scaring people with lies is a strong suit for Trump.

And so, he has already found a way to make today’s immigrants sound scarier than cannibals.

Yes, I know. It’s an impressive feat. Most people would say cannibals were the end of the road. But not Trump.

He’s gone from accusing them of bringing drugs to … get this … accusing them of bringing languages.

They’re streaming into this country while speaking strange, completely unknown languages, Trump says.

“They have languages that nobody in this country has ever heard of,” Trump said on the campaign trail. “It’s a very horrible thing.”

¡Ay, caramba! 

If there’s anything that scares Trump, it’s languages — especially the English language, which he frequently finds elusive and has yet to master bigly.

The way things are going, I figure, Trump’s about a month away from saying that evil space aliens with a taste for human flesh and a secret way to communicate with each other, are rampaging into this country to make us all their enslaved protein source.

And where is the Biden Administration on dealing with these flesh-eating outer space people speaking their gibberish while voting by mail and hunting for our beautiful, frozen embryo babies as amuse-bouche appetizers?

Like I said, Trump’s problem with drumming up this kind of hysteria is that he has to keep feeding it with new layers of shocking nonsense.

So, during his victory speech at Mar-a-Lago on Tuesday night, Trump was already inventing a new line of immigrant fears.

“Today it was announced that 325,000 people were flown in from parts unknown,” Trump told the Mar-a-Lago crowd. “Migrants were flown in. Airplane. Not going through borders. Not going through that great Texas barrier.”

The crowd booed. Mission accomplished.

But back in the real world, the migrants weren’t coming from “parts unknown.” They were participating in an established government program that admits up to 30,000 people each month from a specific group of four countries — Cuba, Haiti, Nicaragua, and Venezuela.

These are successful applicants for a two-year work permit open to those who pass a screening test before entry and have sponsors in the U.S. willing to help them.

This is part of an established immigration policy known as “parole,” which has been used in the past by presidents of both parties. The law allows this form of entry to be used for “urgent humanitarian” purposes or for “significant public benefit.”

The Biden Administration has justified it as a management strategy in this case to keep migrants from those four countries from showing up at the Southern Border. It’s a policy that has been challenged in court by some Republican governors.

More: What's Mar-a-Lago worth? Don't ask taxpayer Donald Trump | Frank Cerabino

Mor Dear Mar-a-Lago Club members: My indictment is going to cost you

You can agree or disagree with the strategy but it’s not the dark, scary secret that Trump painted.

In his telling, it was just a mysterious airlift of unknown migrants recklessly dumped in the country to evade his beloved border wall.

“Millions of people are invading our country,” he said Tuesday night. “This is the worst invasion. No country has ever had anything like it … And they’re coming from rough places, from dangerous places.”

By November, I can only imagine where this immigrant hysteria will take Trump. Don’t be surprised if he starts blaming migrants for a giant comet hurtling toward the planet like the one in Deep Impact.

Oh, to go back to those simple days when immigrants arriving to make asylum claims were characterized mainly as “people with problems.”

Frank Cerabino is a news columnist with The Palm Beach Post, part of the Gannett Newspapers chain.

This article originally appeared on Palm Beach Post: Trump amps up immigrant fear to include cannibalism, strange language.