Could this election cycle get any weirder?
Today saw the second attempt on Donald Trump’s life.
This time, the would-be assassin is in custody after a Secret Service agent saw the barrel of his gun poking through a chain-link fence along the perimeter of Trump International Golf Club in West Palm Beach Florida. Apparently, Ryan Wesley Routh was lying in wait for Trump as he played a round of Sunday golf. The agent opened fire, Routh fled and was apprehended shortly thereafter.
Although this attempt did not produce dramatic footage or iconic picture, it is sure to stoke criticism of his opponents’ rhetoric. That’s particularly true given the initial take on Routh’s social media where, the NY Post wrote, he “frequently touted his do-gooder credentials and championed left-wing causes on social media.”
Then again, the Post also noted:
Routh was a supporter of Vivek Ramaswamy and Nikki Haley, according to one of his posts in which he encouraged the Republican presidential candidates to continue their races. “You cannot quit. Why. You must stay on the ballot to the end. You must fight. You must continue giving speeches and push all the way to election day no matter the election results. Do not give in. Join Nikki and keep working. Never give up,” he wrote.
It seems Routh was kinda all over the place, and, to wit, “he frequently criticized politicians including Trump, current President Joe Biden, and celebrities like Bruno Mars.”
But it gets weirder, folks.
Earlier in the day, Trump trumped Routh’s criticism of Bruno Mars with an all-caps denunciation of Taylor Swift on his Truth Social internet platform. Wrote the man who wants to make himself President again: “I HATE TAYLOR SWIFT!”
That’s right. Trump hates Taylor.
Now that’s weird.
But, then again, it was a week full of weirdness … and incitement.
Peak weirdness came in the middle Trump’s debate-night drubbing at the hands of Kamala Harris. After being baited for the umpteenth time, a visibly triggered Trump barked “They’re eating the dogs!” amidst a diatribe on immigration.
Even a majority of Republicans thought that was weird.
At first blush it, his manic recitation of a thoroughly debunked fever dream was just another in a long list of disqualifying statements he’s easily survived since he kicked-off his political career by calling Mexican migrants “drug dealers, criminals and rapists.”
Upon further reflection, it looks more and more like that “gaffe” wasn’t a gaffe at all. Rather, it signaled his intent to refocus his campaign back to where it all started when he came down the escalator. If he can’t beat Kamala Harris one-one-one, he’s going to run against an opponent he thinks he can beat.
From now through to November, Trump is going to run against immigrants.
That became apparent in the three days after the debate. He again ignored party-wide pleas to “pivot to the economy” and instead went “full Laura Loomer” by doubling and tripling-down on the pet-eating Haitian lie. And when he was asked Friday about the spate of anti-immigrant-linked bomb threats to elementary schools he quickly dismissed it and reiterated his “bloody” vow to not just deport millions of immigrants, but to begin by draining bomb-threatened Springfield, Ohio of its migrant population.
Simply put, Trump’s going to ride or die on immigration, inflation be damned.
I guess that’s not surprising. Anyone who’s watched his rallies knows he’s obsessed with immigration. His rhetoric has become downright alarming. His unsubstantiated rants portray an “invasion” of “blood-poisoning” criminals drawn from “mental hospitals” and “insane asylums.” The invaders are coming from Africa, too, and some speak “languages no one as ever heard of.” He tells his crowds it’s all destruction by design. The Democrats “hate” America.
There’s a familiar bile in his anti-immigrant scapegoating.
It’s been regurgitated into the body politic repeatedly over the last 50-plus years.
It began with the emergence of the racially-tinged “Southern Strategy” after the Civil and Voting Rights Acts upended the Democratic party in the South. The GOP’s Southern Strategy exploited that backlash to flip voters to the Republican party. The key tactic was the blowing of racist dog whistles, and it worked—from Nixon’s “Law and Order” to Reagan’s “Welfare Queens” to GHW Bush’s infamous use of Willie Horton.
Each time demonization trumped logic by appealing to Americans’ lesser angels.
And it’s the lesser of two angels Trump intends to place on the shoulders of the same White suburban swing voters Harris hopes to flip with abortion and the imprimatur of dissident Republicans who despise Trump’s isolationism and his contempt for traditional conservatism.
To counter these prevailing winds Trump is going to turn immigrants into this election cycle’s Willie Horton.
Perhaps it’s an admission he’s losing … an act of desperation in the face of Harris’s rock-star rise in front of enthusiastic crowds. Perhaps it’s born of his eugenics-rooted worldview. Or it’s a toxic cocktail of envy and malice. Putting the psychoanalysis aside, it could be a simple political calculation drawn from his experience, because he traveled that well-worn path to victory in 2016.
That was my conclusion in January of 2017, when I wrote Donald Trump’s Debt to Willie Horton. The goal was to put Trump’s dark appeal into the context the Southern Strategy and demonstrate he wasn’t the aberration many claimed him to be. It now reads as much like a preview of the weeks ahead as it does a review of the past:
On the campaign trail Trump described a society on the brink of chaos. He regaled audiences attending his live shows with tall tales featuring roving gangs of menacing “illegals.” He promised to ban dangerous Muslim interlopers. He warned of a Syrian fifth column skulking into the homeland through the hollow humanitarianism of a refugee-filled “Trojan Horse.” He painted a foreboding picture of African-American neighborhoods as Third World “war zones.” He promised a national crackdown on crime with controversial policing measures like the potentially unconstitutional “stop and frisk” program. He declared himself the “law and order” candidate. And he repeatedly promised to “make America safe again.”
Replace 2016’s focus on crime in Black neighborhoods with today’s immigrant “takeovers” in once-bucolic hamlets like Aurora, Colorado and Springfield, and interchange a “national crackdown on crime” for the “biggest deportation in history,” and you’ve got his campaign’s playbook heading into the November.
Not surprisingly, his campaign has already run an actual Willie Horton-style ad. The ad featured the mugshot of Shawn Michael Tillman who, the ominous voice-over asserts, was charged with murder after being released by a “Minnesota bail fund supported by Kamala Harris.” Pretty thin gruel when it comes to a link. But the logic of the claim is irrelevant. It’s all about the racist, base-level association of the menacing mugshot with the name of your opponent.
But who needs a run-of-the-mill murderer when you’ve got pet-eating Haitians?
Recall that Haitians are no stranger to this type of blanket demonization. Trump previewed himself when he called Haiti a “shithole country” in 2018. Going back further, though, to the beginning of the AIDS scare in the early 1980s, Haitian immigrants were initially ID’d and “otherized” as a source of transmission. Today, Haiti’s poverty, its gang-war chaos and, of course, the color of Haitians’ skin make “pet-eating Haitians” a made-to-order scapegoat.
So, too, are the well-armed Venezuelan gangsters supposedly taking over apartment complexes in Aurora. The fact that elements of that viral story were also debunked over the last week will not dissuade Trump or Elon Musk or the right-wing influencers who churn out AI-generated images that’d make Lee Atwater blush.
And they certainly won’t dissuade JD Vance, who’s making a convincing case that he’s by far the most disingenuous opportunist in American politics. And that’s including Sens. Ted Cruz and Josh Hawley. No, today Vance separated himself from the pack during a Sunday morning interview on CNN that was summarized by NPR. Said Vance:
“The American media totally ignored this stuff until Donald Trump and I started talking about cat memes," Sen. Vance said. "If I have to create stories so that the American media actually pays attention to the suffering of the American people, then that's what I'm going to do."
He’s not just bullhorning the lie, he’s proud of it despite admitting it’s false and he seems ready and willing to “create stories” on an ad hoc basis. His glibness is shocking given that the end result of these “stories” could be the “bloody story” Trump promised to author if he wins. Trump was referring specifically to his plan to deport millions of immigrants. Although the details are unclear, HuffPost just noted that the deportation effort will include the building of concentration camps:
The camps will be built “on open land in Texas near the border” and should have the capacity to house as many as 70,000 people, which would double the United States’ current immigrant detention capacity, Stephen Miller, the main point man on immigration in Trump’s White House, said last year. In multiple interviews, Miller has gleefully described daily flights out of the camps to all corners of the world, an undertaking he said would be “greater than any national infrastructure project” in American history.
And Trump’s goon squad is standing back and standing by:
“Trump comes back in January — I’ll be on his heels coming back, and I will run the biggest deportation force this country has ever seen,” Thomas Homan, who served as acting director of Immigration and Customs Enforcement during the Trump administration, said in July at a conference for Trump-aligned conservatives.
“They ain’t seen shit yet,” Homan said. “Wait until 2025.”
He’s not alone. MAGA Nation is also looking forward to 2025. More and more, it feels like the rest of us are looking past the dog whistles of the 1980s and we’re now staring into the abyss of the 1930s. And that’s not just weird, it’s kinda scary.