Fear and loathing on campaign trail
Donald Trump is stepping up his racial rhetoric in the leadup to the midterm vote, write Philip Rucker and Felicia Sonmez
US President Donald Trump, joined by many Republican candidates, is dramatically escalating his efforts to take advantage of racial divisions and cultural fears in the final days of the midterm campaign, part of an overt attempt to rally white supporters to the polls and preserve the GOP’s congressional majorities.
Trump yesterday ratcheted up the anti-immigrant rhetoric that has been the centrepiece of his midterm push by portraying a slow-moving migrant caravan, consisting mostly of families travelling on foot through Mexico, as a dangerous “invasion” and suggesting that if any migrants throw rocks they could be shot by the troops that he has deployed at the border.
The President also vowed to take action next week to construct “massive tent cities” aimed at holding migrants indefinitely and making it more difficult for them to remain in the country.
“These are tough people. These are not angels. These are not little angels,” Trump said at a rally in Columbia, Missouri yesterday, warning of “thousands and thousands of people” marching toward the US border. “And we’re not letting them into our country.”
The remarks capped weeks of incendiary rhetoric from Trump, and they came just five days after a gunman reportedly steeped in antiJewish conspiracy theories about the migrant caravan allegedly slaughtered 11 people at a Pittsburgh synagogue in what is believed to be the worst anti-Semitic attack in US history.
Trump has repeatedly cast the migrants as “bad thugs” and criminals while asserting without evidence that the caravan contains “unknown Middle Easterners” — apparently meant to suggest there are terrorists mixed in with the families fleeing violence in Honduras and other Central American nations and seeking asylum in the United States.
The President said on Thursday that he “wouldn’t be surprised” if liberal donor George Soros had funded the migrant groups — echoing the conspiracy theory that is thought to have influenced the accused Pittsburgh shooter.
Trump questioned again at yesterday’s rally whether it was really “just by accident” that the caravans were forming.
“Somebody was involved, not on our side of the ledger,” Trump told the crowd. “Somebody was involved, and then somebody else told him, ‘You made a big mistake’.”
Many of Trump’s Republican acolytes, from Connecticut to California, have followed his lead in the use of inflammatory messages, including an ad branding a minority Democratic candidate as a national security threat and a mailer visually depicting a Jewish Democrat as a crazed person with a wad of money in his hand.
Trump and his supporters argue that the media and the President’s political opponents call racism or anti-Semitism where none exists as a way to demean him and divide Americans.
Meanwhile, an online campaign video personally promoted by Trump this week was denounced by Democrats and some Republicans yesterday as toxic or even racist.
The footage focuses on Luis Bracamontes, a twice-deported Mexican immigrant who was sentenced to death in April for killing two California law enforcement officers in 2014. The recording portrays him as the face of the current migrant caravan, when in fact he has been in prison for four years.
The 53-second video is filled with audible expletives and shows Bracamontes smiling as he declares, “I killed f ****** cops.”
With a shaved head, a moustache and long chin hair, Bracamontes shows no remorse for his crimes and vows, “I’m going to kill more cops soon”.
Trump shared the video on Thursday with his 55.5 million followers on Twitter, and it remained pinned atop his Twitter page the yesterday. The video had been viewed 3.5 million times by yesterday afternoon.
Ohio’s Republican Governor John Kasich, a potential 2020 challenger to the President, said Trump crossed a new Rubicon by posting the video.
“We all go through periods where we’re in a tough race and we’ve got to figure out what we should do, but at some point there’s just an ethical line that you should not cross, and I think it’s been crossed here,” Kasich said in an interview.
“This latest ad is an all-time low. It’s a terrible ad, it’s designed to frighten people and it’s wrong.”
Democratic strategist Donna Brazile said leaders of her party have two schools of thought about Trump’s video and his caravan rhetoric in general. She said they fear that reacting to it only allows the President to dictate the terms of the debate and “spread the toxins into the bloodstream of the electorate”, but that the tone is so appalling —
especially coming from the President himself — that they feel compelled to speak out.
“Trump has opened up a whole new playbook to sow discord and to weaponise hate,” Brazile said. “Everyone has seen low politics. We’ve all done low politics. But Lee Atwater would be shocked at the vitriol we’re seeing today — and, man, Lee was scrappy. This is virulent. It’s bone-chilling. It’s like a toxin.” Atwater, who died in 1991, was a Republican consultant who was known for crafting culturally divisive messages.
As Trump has intensified his rhetoric, a growing number of Republican candidates across the country have followed suit. But others have spoken out against it.
Republican Senator Jeff Flake, a frequent critic of Trump who is retiring at the end of his current term, said in a tweet yesterday that the ad featuring Bracamontes was “sickening” and that “Republicans everywhere should denounce it”.
Republican congressman Carlos Curbelo said on CNN that while he hadn’t seen the ad, it was “definitely part of a divide-and-conquer strategy that a lot of politicians, including the President, have used successfully in the past”.
“I hope this doesn’t work,” Curbelo said. “I hope that type of strategy starts failing in our country, but that’s up to the American people.”