Mary Papenfuss reports Rachel Maddow: Trump May Have Cooked Up ‘Taped Women’ From ‘Sicario’:
President Donald Trump has been obsessively repeating a horror tale of trafficked women in cars at the southern border, their mouths taped shut, so they “can’t even breathe.” The problem is that trafficked women and border officials apparently have no idea what he’s talking about. Now Rachel Maddow, along with some media outlets, believe it could be possible that Trump witnessed it with his very own eyes — on the violent movie “Sicario: Day of the Soldado.”
The film shows such a scene at the Mexican border, eerily similar to what Trump has described. There is also a scene of Muslim prayer rugs in the southern desert, which has also popped up in a Trump tweet. He has talked about the smugglers’ amazing cars, just like in the movie.
All are “plot points in the same movie — which is fiction,” Maddow emphasized Monday.
“Now in any normal administration it would be insane to suggest … even joke about the president of the United States seeing stuff in a movie … and maybe thinking it was real — or at least real enough to justify an actual military deployment of thousands of active duty U.S. troops to the border,” she said.
Update: Quinn Owen and Matt Gutman report Fact Check: No evidence for Trump’s tales of duct-taped women, prayer rugs at border (“An internal administration inquiry turned up no evidence of Trump’s claim.”).
Trump’s own administration can’t find evidence of his claims; the theory that Trump’s lurid tales come from a movie is looking more likely by the minute.