Did Trump Get His Blue Duct Tape and Prayer Rug Border Tales From the ‘Sicario’ Sequel?
Donald Trump‘s bizarre claims about duct-taped women, prayer rugs, and smuggling supercars at the U.S.-Mexico border have led several cable news outlets to wonder if he’s getting this stuff from the 2018 film “Sicario: Day of the Soledado.” But is he?
Over the past month or so, Trump has taken to offering bizarrely specific claims about activities at the border that no one seems to be able to substantiate.
Among them are his repeated and strangely graphic descriptions of women being bound with various types of tape (“ Usually blue tape, as they call it,” “electrical tape,” or “duct tape“) and smuggled over the border, traffickers of various sorts with “stronger, bigger, and faster vehicles than our police have, and than ICE has, and than Border Patrol has” that, for some reason, usually make left turns, and Muslim prayer rugs being found in the Texas desert.
And so it is that the Sicario Theory was born. Late Sunday night or early Sunday morning, a sharp-eyed Twitter user posted a thread demonstrating that these elements were all, to some degree, plot points from the film. On Monday night, MSNBC’s Rachel Maddow brought the theory into the cable news universe, and by Tuesday, CNN was all over it.
With or without the Sicario connection, Trump’s fantasies have taken a sobering turn, as Vox reports that after no one in Trump’s administration was able to substantiate the claims, an assistant Border Patrol chief emailed agents asking them to come up with evidence to back up Trump’s claims about duct-taped women.
But is it really possible that Trump got all of this from a Hollywood sequel? Let’s take a look.
The similarities to the film are rather superficial. The prayer rugs are definitely there, but the teenage girl who gets duct-taped isn’t being trafficked into the United States, she’s being kidnapped so she can be turned over to a cartel in Mexico. And the super vehicles don’t belong to traffickers or smugglers, they belong to corrupt Mexican law enforcement.
Are we expected to believe that Donald Trump could not follow the plot of a movie well enough to accurately conflate it with his own notions about the southern border?
Oky, fair enough. But the claims about prayer rugs in the desert has been around since at least 2004, and received wide coverage in 2014 when then-Lt. Governor David Dewhurst made the claim in a speech, after several Fox News guests had made similar accusations:
But none of those stories has ever been substantiated, as Politifact noted. And Trump himself cited an unnamed rancher who claimed to have found multiple prayer rugs, also without evidence. Trump’s own State Department reported, in September, that no terrorists have used the southern border to infiltrate the United States, which is the clear and bigoted implication of these stories.
Therefore, it’s likely that Trump — who is a longtime devotee of terrorism fanfic — already had those stories of prayer rugs rattling around in his head. But the Sicario sequel made its debut on cable this month, the day after Trump’s prayer rug tweet.
Therefore, a more likely scenario is that he saw a commercial for the film that featured these elements out of context, rather than that he sat through and misunderstood the entire movie.
Watch the Maddow and CNN segments above, via MSNBC and CNN, and see for yourself.
[Featured image via screengrabs]
