Let’s consider the lives of a few average Chicagoans, chosen at random.

There’s … John Wayne Gacy. He was … let’s see … a pedophile who murdered 33 boys and buried them in his crawl space. There’s …Richard Speck, who raped and killed eight student nurses in a single night of terror. A third? Umm, Jeffrey Dahmer was a Chicagoan — well, he actually lived in Milwaukee but once cruised down to Chicago to find a victim, which qualifies him. Not to forget typical Chicagoan H.H. Holmes, whose grisly killings during the World’s Columbian Exposition are chronicled in “The Devil in the White City.”

Gosh, those typical Chicagoans are all mass murderers, aren’t they? Makes an impartial observer coolly assessing the facts suspect that Chicagoans are a pretty dangerous lot. I’m surprised anybody dares step foot in the city, packed as it is with brutal psychopaths and twisted killers.

What’s that you say? This is not a random selection of Chicagoans? Rather, I’ve obviously cherry-picked these individuals specifically because of their depraved actions. That rather than representing the city as a whole, they are extreme exceptions. The vast majority of Chicagoans don’t kill anybody, ever, but are decent human beings just trying to live their lives as best they can.

OPINION

I was being deceptive, wasn’t I? And why would I do that?

Maybe because we just witnessed an identical show of deception on the part of the President of the United States. Over the weekend, Donald Trump replied the national outcry at tearing immigrant children from their families with a loathsome display of deception, exactly along the lines demonstrated above. The president and the White House both firing off tweets of shocking crudity. Here’s one:

“Laura Wilkerson lost her son Josh in 2010. He was tortured and beaten to death by an illegal alien.”

And another:

“We are gathered today to hear directly from the AMERICAN VICTIMS of ILLEGAL IMMIGRATION.”

That refers to a gathering of “angel families,” Trump’s term for those whose relatives were killed by undocumented immigrants — who do commit crimes, of course, though at a lower rate than natural-born Americans (when do the angel families of those killed by white, native-born shooters gather at the White House? Oh, right, that would never happen). The underlying truth that can’t be mentioned enough: Republicans do not fear immigrants because they commit crimes; Republicans fixate on the crimes committed by immigrants in an attempt to justify their fear.

Fear of what? I can’t say and hate to speak for them. I wish those writing in to claim it’s the illegal part that so bothers them — and please, hang onto that passion for the law when Robert Mueller issues his findings — would address this. Setting crime apart, as an obvious red herring, what’s the real reason? It seems clear Republicans fear the idea of a semi-Hispanic United States. Which is crazy because a) we’re already there, 17 percent Latino, mostly citizens and b) by 2050, Hispanics will be a quarter of the population. Deal with it. But not like this.

Trump is doing what Hitler did, with his condemnation of “the common ambition of all Jews to exploit nations and make them the slaves of their international guild of criminals” — that’s Hitler I’m quoting, not Trump, and it speaks volumes that I have to make sure there’s no confusion.

The president is a bigot. He was elected on a platform of racism, and hate is his safe space to flee to whenever he gets into trouble. His supporters are either bigots or just don’t care about bigotry because they want to make the country “great again,” aka, return to a white supremacy. That ain’t ever happening.

What will happen is a lot of damage to our nation’s social fabric. Every day Trump is president the United States drifts away from its ideals, and our future — multi-cultural, with a 25 percent population of Hispanic heritage — becomes harder to achieve. We are not only poisoning our social landscape today but burying caches of poison that will plague us for years to come.

I don’t know about you, but I want to look back and say I did all I could and spoke out, loud and clear, again and again. Donald Trump is a racist appealing to our country’s worst instincts. He will lead us over a cliff to disaster unless he’s stopped.