Maddow Rips Trump’s ‘Scare Stories’ of Immigrants Coming to ‘Rape and Murder Americans’ Because ‘It’s in Their Nature’

Shortly after Donald Trump delivered his relatively subdued Oval Office address Tuesday night, MSNBC’s Rachel Maddow ripped into Trump for resurrecting the image of undocumented immigrant rapists and murderers that he’s been pushing since the day he announced his candidacy.

Trump hit a lot of familiar notes in his short speech, including tales of immigrants committing brutal crimes on American soil. Immediately following the address, Maddow called out Trump’s scare tactics, and the motivation behind them.

“Mainly, the president’s speech was a litany of scare stories of immigrants being terrible criminals who are coming into the United States to rape and murder Americans essentially, in the president’s telling, for pleasure, because it’s in their nature” Maddow said.

“It’s the argument the president made the very first day he came down the escalator in Trump Tower and shocked the Republican world when he announced he would be running for the Republican nomination because of the Mexican rapists and criminals coming across the border,” she added.

As one of Maddow’s panelists noted, however, undocumented immigrants commit crimes at a significantly lower rate than native-born Americans.

Maddow also noted that Trump did not break any “new ground” in his speech, and debunked Trump’s claim that the southern border is a “pipeline for vast quantities of illegal drugs,” noting that “The president’s own drug enforcement administration would say that’s not the case, or would at least say the president’s proposed solution, a wall, would not stop the vast majority of hard drugs coming in.”

Prior to the speech, speculation ran rampant that Trump would declare a state of emergency in order to fund his border wall, but Trump’s speech contained no such declaration. As Maddow noted, it was nothing new.

Watch the clip above, via MSNBC.

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