Europe’s worsening refugee crisis is in many ways the best thing that could have happened to Donald Trump’s Presidential campaign.
Last summer, the brazen billionaire kicked off his run for the White House by taking aim at America’s broken immigration policy. Trump painted a picture of an impossibly porous Mexican border across which stream hordes of drug dealers and rapists who poison American society and bleed the economy dry.
As luck would have it, the flood of migrants streaming into Western Europe from the Mid-East accelerated just as Trump’s anti-immigrant rants hit the airwaves, affording the Teflon Don a bulletproof PR cover for what might otherwise have been a largely indefensible string of vitriolic rhetoric.
Since then, the GOP frontrunner has used the San Bernardino attacks to justify a call for a “No Muslims Allowed” sign on the US treehouse and now, sure enough, he’s pointing to the wave of sexual assaults in Cologne on New Year’s Eve as evidence of what can happen when you “go off the reservation” and implement an irresponsible immigration policy. More importantly, he suggests the assaults are also evidence of why he, rather than Angela Merkel, should have been TIME’s person of the year.
Here’s the clip. Enjoy.