Read the new America’s Voice report on the failure of the GOP’s reliance on xenophobia in electoral campaigns from 2017 – 2019 HERE; Watch the accompanying video HERE
In a must-read opinion piece published yesterday in the Washington Post, Greg Sargent features the new America’s Voice report highlighting how Republican reliance on xenophobia keeps failing.
In his article titled, “Trump’s latest campaign ploy is disgusting — and it will fail,” Sargent argues persuasively that the reliance on xenophobia by Trump and Republicans has backfired as an electoral strategy.
As Sargent writes, “Trump surely thinks coronavirus has people so terrified that this demagoguery will be a winner this time. What we’re seeing here constitutes yet another absurd effort to erase the story of those failures. But it won’t work.”
The article is excerpted below and can be read in full here:
President Trump rarely bothers to conceal his basest motives, which may explain why he revealed that his new suspension of immigration is a rank reelection ploy even before the policy was complete. His campaign blasted out a message describing it as a “decision to protect us from the coronavirus.”
If that’s meant to imply that protection from immigrants is equivalent to protection from a deadly pathogen that has killed over 40,000 Americans, it wouldn’t be surprising: Trump and his allies have cast immigration as a deadly infestation for years.
…A new report from pro-immigrant America’s Voice provides an accounting of how often this tactic has failed Republicans during the Trump era. Because Trump won in 2016, pundits remain reluctant to acknowledge that this anti-immigrant demagoguery has been unsuccessfully wielded by an extraordinarily long series of failed GOP campaigns in the three years since.
As the report and a new companion video show, the rhetoric has been as wretched as it has been ineffective. An endless sewage gusher of ads and mailers has featured rapists and murderers, tattooed MS-13 members and dark hordes storming the border, while bashing their Democratic targets for supporting popular policies like legalization for the undocumented.
…Trump surely thinks coronavirus has people so terrified that this demagoguery will be a winner this time. But coronavirus had already spread widely here in part due to his own failures, and this move won’t do anything to address the coming economic carnage, either.
What we’re seeing here constitutes yet another absurd effort to erase the story of those failures. But it won’t work.
