President Donald Trump casts shadows on the wall as he walks at the end of a press conference, on July 6, 2017. Czarek Sokolowski/AP

President Donald Trump has spent a decade painting large swaths of the United States as a hellscape, dating back to his dark 2017 inaugural address and his demagogic 2016 campaign.

But increasingly, he’s upped the ante on trying to leverage that supposed hellscape. He’s used it to float a crackdown on his political opponents and to justify deploying the military on US soil. The message is increasingly that things are so bad that you must give Trump more power to deal with it.

There is a major problem with this, though. And that’s that – as with so many of Trump’s claims – he rests his case on a series of falsehoods and exaggerations. That doesn’t mea

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