Despite what his advisers tell him, Trump refuses to abandon his tried-and-true (if always false) play list—which primarily centers on drumming up irrational fear and hatred of the “other.” From the start, Trump’s 2024 presidential campaign regularly highlighted stories about migrant crime, using pictures of Black and brown men who have immigrated to the U.S. and been arrested for terrible crimes, including murder, especially (the audience is led to believe) of young white women. Now the campaign is pushing that same theme, only Trump’s Black female opponent, Kamala Harris, is depicted as responsible for all of this supposed violence and chaos. (Remember, whether she’s “Black” or of Indian descent, from a MAGAs historical perspective, she’s definitely a member of the dreaded “other.“) Yes, “Kamala Harris imports rape and plunder into our communities,” a Trump campaign post declared last week. “President Trump will end this carnage and deport these illegal aliens back to where they came from.”
Trump has gone so far as to depict a pleasant suburban neighborhood as “Your Neighborhood Under Trump” and contrast it with a chaotic scene of Black and Hispanic migrants captioned: “Your Neighborhood Under Kamala.” How blatant is that? “Import the third world,” his post declared. “Become the third world.” (Talk about replacing his trademark dog whistle for a bullhorn!) And, of course, he continues to insist that countries all over the world are emptying out their “insane asylums” and sending the patients to the U.S. It’s hard to imagine that even the dumbest MAGA really believes this nonsense, but when has that stopped him before? And lest any of Trump’s “greatest hits” collection be forgotten, the “neighborhood” post went beyond his fixation on migrant crime to highlight his campaign’s embrace of the “Great Replacement” theory—the fear that Black and brown migrants will displace white Americans in the voting booth, the workplace, and neighborhoods near you. The plots yet to be hashed by the evil (socialist, communist) Democrats know no bounds in MAGA world!
According to Donald Trump, “All We Have to Do Is Define Our Opponent as Being a Communist or a Socialist or Somebody That’s Gonna Destroy Our Country.”
Trump’s livestreamed conversation with Elon Musk on X put the Trump campaign in perspective: if you don’t have anything to offer your voters then, heck, frighten them into submission by offering up their primal fear of the “other.” Musk and Trump’s other billionaire supporters expect him to champion their wishes—lower taxes, less regulation, no government interference in business, etc.—even if it requires his supporters voting against their own economic interests. In order to support Trump, MAGAs must accept his notion that “a communist system [is] where everyone gets healthcare.” Needless to say, If that were the case, a lot of MAGAs would be far better off in a communist system!
After they lost the Civil War, the “slavocracy” sought to protect their power and wealth by portraying everything that would give their former slaves a chance for equality—land, education, opportunity, and the right to vote—as coming out of poor whites’ pockets, and thus communism and socialism. Yes, it’s true that establishing equality for Blacks would require taking resources from whites, but whites had taken Black’s slave labor for over 200 years! This is how MAGA Republicans ended up labeling things like business regulation and infrastructure spending as forms of communism and socialism. One need not look too hard to see the origin of V.P. candidate J.D. Vance’s false claim that Kamala Harris “wants to give $25,000 to illegal aliens to buy American homes.”