Trumpocracy: The Corruption of the American Republic

by David Frum

When Mexico sends its people, they’re not sending their best. They’re not sending you. They’re not sending you. They’re sending people that have lots of problems, and they’re bringing those problems with us [sic]. They’re bringing drugs. They’re bringing crime. They’re rapists. And some, I assume, are good people.”13 Trump’s harsh language scandalized almost every pundit who commented on his words. But three weeks later, on July 5, an illegal alien from Mexico, Juan Francisco Lopez-Sanchez, gunned down Kathryn Steinle, a young American woman, on a San Francisco wharf. Lopez-Sanchez discharged a stolen weapon. It’s not clear that he was aiming at Steinle. Aimed or not, Lopez-Sanchez’s bullet struck the thirty-two-year-old in the back and severed her aorta in front of her horrified father. She died in the hospital two hours later. It soon emerged that Lopez-Sanchez, a repeat drug offender, had been ordered deported five times since 1993. He was at large that day in July because San Francisco’s sanctuary city law forbade local police to notify federal authorities when they released him after his most recent detention. Within a week of the Steinle killing, Donald Trump skyrocketed into first place in the Republican field.