Trump makes xenophobia the centerpiece of his campaign
The Republican candidate is linking everything from insecurity, the economy and even the response to Hurricane Helene to immigration
Donald Trump made his way to the White House in 2016 on the back of xenophobic and racist rhetoric, and he believes that this is the best way to regain the presidency eight years later. The Republican candidate has doubled down on this course of action with references to the “bad genes” that criminal migrants are bringing to the country, two words that he continually uses together. Trump has made illegal immigration the scapegoat for all the problems affecting the United States, resorting to lies without a second thought. It is not a new strategy, certainly not in this campaign, but the former president has now made it the center around which all of his messages revolve, whether he’s talking about crime, economic problems or even relief aid to the victims of Hurricane Helene.
Trump has been spreading lies about the response to the devastating storm, including the falsehood that President Joe Biden was “sleeping” and did not respond to a call from Georgia Governor Brian Kemp, a Republican — a claim that Kemp himself has denied. He also floated the baseless notion that the government was leaving Republican-dominated areas without help. But his most insistent fabrication was the that the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) had run out of money because funds had been diverted to undocumented immigrants.
“It is categorically false. It is not true. It is a false statement,” White House Press Secretary Karine Jean-Pierre responded at a news conference. But her denial, as well as by FEMA itself, the Department of Homeland Security, and even House Speaker Mike Johnson, a Republican, was of no use. Trump continued to spread the falsehood and took out of context the fact that the first initial check to victims was for $750 per person, claiming that this was all they were going to receive.
The former president had already shown at the debate with Democratic candidate Kamala Harris that he does not care whether an accusation is true or not as long as it fits into his political narrative that immigrants are invading the U.S. because of Joe Biden and his vice president and that they are the cause of almost all evils. It was at that debate that he said that Haitian immigrants in Springfield, Ohio are “eating the dogs, they are eating the cats.”
Along with Springfield, another town lends itself particularly well to Trump’s objectives: Aurora, a city of 400,000 residents in Colorado. A large number of immigrants have arrived in the area and there are real problems of insecurity and public health in degraded areas, a reality that existed before the last wave of immigration.
A video showing armed men on the landing of a staircase in an Aurora building was used by Republicans to claim that Venezuelan gangs, particularly the so-called Tren de Aragua, were violently taking over entire areas of the city. The incident involved the corporate interests of the company that owns the three-building complex where the video was recorded, and its reluctance to rehabilitate it. Venezuelan gangs were the perfect excuse, and images from the staircase were broadcast endlessly on conservative channels, especially Fox News.
Rally in Aurora
It is also true, however, that authorities are concerned about the activities of Tren de Aragua, not only in Aurora, but also in other parts of the country, including New York. That offers a perfect breeding ground for Trump’s message. The former president has said that the mass deportation of immigrants that he plans to launch if he returns to the White House will begin in Springfield and Aurora.
Trump’s campaign has announced in apocalyptic tones a rally for its candidate in the Colorado city for this Friday. “Aurora, Colorado, has become a ‘war zone’ due to an influx of violent Venezuelan prison gang members from Tren de Aragua,” said the press release. “With approximately 43,000 migrants flooding the neighboring city of Denver since December 2022, many of these migrants have made their way to Aurora, bringing chaos and fear with them, Local families have been forced to flee their homes as Tren de Aragua members terrorize apartment complexes with guns, theft, and rampant drug activity. Kamala Harris’ open-border policies are turning once-safe communities into nightmares for law-abiding citizens.”
In a radio interview on Monday, Trump pressed his xenophobic message, linking immigration and crime and claiming that the influx of immigrants had brought “bad genes” to the United States. His campaign later said he was referring to criminals, not immigrants in general.
On Saturday, at a rally with Elon Musk in Butler, Pennsylvania, where he suffered an attack in July, he said that prisons around the world are being emptied to send murderers, drug dealers, human smugglers and gang members to the U.S. as immigrants.
The White House press secretary on Monday criticized Trump for his statement about migrants’ “bad genes”: “That type of language is hateful, it’s disgusting, it’s inappropriate and has no place in our country,” said Karine Jean-Pierre at Monday’s press briefing. “This comes from the same vile statements that we’ve had, that we’ve heard about migrants being poison, poisoning the blood — that’s disgusting.” The former president has spoken in the past about immigrants “poisoning the blood” of the United States, paraphrasing none other than Adolf Hitler.
Harris recalled on Monday in an interview on CBS’s 60 Minutes that her rival torpedoed a bipartisan agreement in the Senate to pass a border security law. “Donald Trump got word that this bill was afoot and could be passed and he wants to run on a problem instead of fixing a problem, so he told his buddies in Congress, ‘Kill the bill. Don’t let it move forward,’” she said. “I believe that the people of America want a leader who’s not trying to divide us and demean.”
Sign up for our weekly newsletter to get more English-language news coverage from EL PAÍS USA Edition