Trump's debate performance at once laughable and haunting
Using false claims about Haitians eating neighbors' pets to stir hatred, harsh enforcement, while ignoring his own tribe's lawbreaking
Donald Trump’s outrageous debate claims about legal Haitian immigrants in Springfield, Ohio “eating the pets of the people that live there” weren’t just racist tropes he knew were untrue, but used to stir up anti-immigrant sentiments. They were also critical reminders of how the former president attacked foreign-born people in his term as president, and would do so again, if elected.
“In Springfield (Ohio) they’re eating the dogs. The people that came in, they’re eating the cats,” Trump declared, embellishing a claim spread earlier by his running mate, J.D. Vance of Ohio. That rubbish originated with an arrest of a non-Haitian woman in another Ohio city. The Springfield/Haitian angles had been debunked by the time Trump took the stage in Philadelphia to debate Vice-President Kamala Harris.
https://www.springfieldnewssun.com/news/springfield-police-say-no-reports-of-pets-stolen-after-viral-social-media-post/3WSIZQNHQVE4NP4TS5BVHBB2PY/
But once he’d put it out there, damage was already done. Of 25 debate-watchers asked by The Washington Post afterwards if those claims made sense to them, 19 said no, and six said yes. Nearly one in three believed it. And more than 67 million people watched the debate. It’s highly likely those claims will shape some perceptions of Haitian immigrants.
Trump’s reliance on immigrants from the developing world, especially undocumented ones, to carry the weight for him isn’t original. U.S. employers, including in Iowa, do it for cheap labor. Cartels that transport migrants fleeing poverty or violence to do it for profit. Trump does it to divide people and win elections.
Reviving his 2017 campaign attacks on Mexicans -- “They're bringing drugs. They're bringing crime. They're rapists. And some, I assume, are good people” -- he did it repeatedly Tuesday. No matter what he was asked, he dragged in immigrants to trash them, as “terrorists,” “common street criminals,” “drug dealers,” and more.
He brought them up when ABC’s David Muir asked about prospects for a peaceful transition of power, in reference to the Jan. 6 Capitol insurgency Trump had inspired after losing election. “You talk about the Capitol. Why are we allowing these millions of people to come through on the southern border? “ Trump demanded.
He segued to immigrants when asked about his recent acknowledgement that he lost the last election “by a whisker,” after insisting for years that it was stolen from him. “Our elections are bad,” Trump retorted. “And a lot of these illegal immigrants coming in, they're trying to get them to vote. They can't even speak English. They don't even know what country they're in practically. “
He pivoted to immigrants when Harris criticized his ties to Putin in the face of the Ukraine invasion, and his admiration for dictators like Kim Jong Un. “She's the one that caused it, that's weak on national security, “ Trump declared, “by allowing every nation… 168 different countries sending people into our country. Their crime rates are way down.”
He defaulted to immigrant- bashing when the topic was trade deficits and China, after accusing Harris of being a Marxist because of her father, a Stanford economics professor. “But when you look at what she's done to our country and when you look at these millions and millions of people that are pouring into our country monthly … And just look at what they're doing to our country. They're criminals. “
He repeatedly claimed other countries’ crime rates have fallen while ours have risen “because they've taken their criminals off the street, and they've given them to her (Harris) to put into our country.” It took Muir to point out the FBI’s finding that U.S. violent crime is down. Trump even accused Harris of wanting “to do transgender operations on illegal aliens in prison.”
The hyperbole may work on some voters but the hypocrisy, if nothing else, should squelch the admiration. Recall that as president, Trump launched an effort to strip citizenship from even naturalized U.S. citizens and deport them if they’d ever used a fake ID to get in. But he’s willing to ignore the fraudulent documents reportedly allowed by his CEO of Trump Media, former California congressman Devin Nunes, to employ undocumented immigrants on his family’s Iowa farm. A 2018 Esquire story lays that out. https://www.esquire.com/news-politics/a23471864/devin-nunes-family-farm-iowa-california/
“It’s an open secret that the system is built on easily obtained fraudulent documents," author Ryan Lizza wrote after interviewing several sources about the NuStar dairy farm. .
I visited the farm after the article came and was ordered to leave.
2018 photo by Rekha Basu
https://www.desmoinesregister.com/story/opinion/columnists/2018/10/04/iowa-steve-king-voters-turned-off-divisive-rhetoric-congress-scholten-immigration-kavanaugh-election/1508160002/
Nunes, once a supporter of amnesty for undocumented workers kept quiet when Trump “instituted a draconian policy of zero tolerance for all undocumented people,” Lizza wrote. Later, as he reported, Nunes completely caved to champion aggressive enforcement tactics.
https://www.propublica.org/article/trump-media-ceo-devin-nunes-north-macedonia-truthsocial-hristijan-mickoski
Nunes, shown standing by Trump at the Republican National Convention, now stands by when Trump claims immigrants are “destroying the fabric of our country,” and denounces a form of crime “called migrant crime.” Trump has pledged, if elected, to go after all undocumented people in the U.S. -- the U.S. Department of Homeland Security says here are 11 million -- using local police and door -to-door raids. He hasn't ruled out building detention camps in the U.S. or involving the military.
https://abcnews.go.com/Politics/closer-donald-trumps-2024-vow-deport-millions-migrants/story?id=110469177
If you think such talk is benign, think about what he did as president. In 2018 Trump’s administration separated incoming immigrant children from 500 sets of parents before the practice was stopped. By then it was impossible to locate family members to reunite them. In his first week of office, Trump issued a ban to prevent Muslim refugees and people from several Muslim-majority countries from entering the U.S. Some of those efforts were blocked by federal courts, and later revised. In 2020, his bans were on people from Libya, Iran, Somalia, Yemen, Syria, North Korea, and Venezuela. They were later expanded to include certain nationals from Sudan, Nigeria, Tanzania, Myanmar, Eritrea, and Kyrgyzstan.
When Joe Biden took office, he rescinded the bans as discriminatory, calling them “a stain on our national conscience,” that undermined national security by jeopardizing alliances.
There are inescapable ironies to Trump’s blaming the Biden-Harris administration for not having dealt with border crossings. As Harris pointed out in the debate, he was the one who urged Republican members of Congress to kill a bipartisan bill that would have added 1,500 border agents and resources to fight transnational criminal organizations and the smuggling of guns, drugs and people.
https://www.nbcnews.com/politics/congress/republicans-kill-border-bill-sign-trumps-strength-mcconnells-waning-in-rcna137477
Harris mocked Trump’s uproar over immigrant crimes as “so rich, coming from someone who has been prosecuted for national security crimes, economic crimes, election interference, has been found liable for sexual assault…”
Trump’s debate performance was at once laughable for its hypocrisy, accusations and mistruths, and a haunting reminder of some of his most damaging acts as president. And it’s a harbinger of what’s to come if he’s voted in again. You know what they say about learning from the past or being condemned to repeat it.
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Absolutely, his rhetoric on immigrants is dangerous. I was also disturbed by his assertion that Hungary’s Viktor Orban is respected as a leader because he is feared. That’s the crux of Trump’s attempted power-grabs - believing that fear equals respect.