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In light of Donald Trump’s overtly anti-immigrant platform, it wasn’t too surprising to see the Republican seize on the story of Ruby Garcia, a 25-year-old Michigan woman who was allegedly murdered by an undocumented immigrant. At a campaign event this week, the former president referenced Garcia and boasted, “I spoke to some of her family.”
As NBC News reported, there’s reason to believe otherwise.
Garcia’s sister said Trump didn’t speak with anyone from the family, and she criticized him for politicizing her sister’s death. “He did not speak with any of us,” Ruby’s sister, Mavi Garcia, said in an interview with NBC affiliate WOOD-TV. “So it’s kind of shocking seeing that he had said he had spoken with us ... misinforming people on live TV,” she said.
Mavi Garcia went on to tell the local affiliate, “It’s always been about illegal immigrants. Nobody really speaks about when Americans do heinous crimes, and it’s kind of shocking why he would just bring up illegals. What about Americans who do heinous crimes like that?”
She added that hearing Trump’s claim was “shocking.”
I more or less assumed that the Trump campaign would push back. It didn’t. In fact, the Republican’s political operation has been reluctant to say anything about this over the past couple of days, and no one from the former president’s team has been willing to clarify whether Trump actually spoke to any of the victim’s relatives or not.
Their silence isn’t definitive proof that Trump peddled a false claim, but given the circumstances, the Republican’s penchant for brazenly lying, and the former president’s habit of pointing to conversations that only happened in his mind, it’s probably fair to express some skepticism about the veracity of his dubious claim.
All of which leads to a few key points.
First, if you’re exploiting someone’s murder to score cheap political points in an election, stop.
Second, if you’re exploiting someone’s murder and you reference the victim’s relatives, keep in mind that they can speak for themselves, too.
Third, if you’re planning to exploit someone’s murder, try to get the details right. As my MSNBC colleague Clarissa-Jan Lim noted, Trump not only appears to have pointed to family interactions that did not occur, he also made incorrect claims about the alleged killer and misstated the victim’s age.
And finally, I’m trying to imagine what the reaction might be if President Joe Biden publicly declared that he’d spoken to a murder victim’s family members, only to have evidence emerge soon after that those interactions hadn’t happened.
I have a hunch it’d lead to another round of intense scrutiny about the Democratic incumbent’s age and cognitive abilities. So why isn’t the presumptive GOP nominee facing similar questions now?