Washington, DC — In the final sprint to Election Day, Donald Trump observers across the board are raising the alarm that he has become increasingly unstable and weird while more fully embracing fascistic rhetoric and policies and is leaning even more heavily into a vile and anti-immigrant closing argument. Trump and his party are proposing a dangerous vision for the nation centered on violence and retribution.
According to Vanessa Cárdenas, Executive Director of America’s Voice:
“Donald Trump’s closing message is a malignant cancer, and it is rapidly spreading. It started years ago by disparaging immigrants as murderers and rapists and has since morphed into more vicious and outrageous claims. Not content with demonizing immigrants, Trump is now pledging to bring the full retribution of the American government down on you if you oppose him. At no time in American history has a major party candidate for the presidency embraced such vile, hateful, and demonic views of one another. As his rhetoric and vision for America gets even more dangerous, there is a growing chorus of voices highlighting both the extensive damage his indiscriminate mass deportations would inflict on all Americans, but also how unprecedented and dangerous it remains that the argument of a major party presidential candidate is a carbon copy of the language used by fascists and white nationalists.”
Among those discussing Trump’s dark messaging are:
- Myah Ward in POLITICO, “We watched 20 Trump rallies. His racist, anti-immigrant messaging is getting darker.”: “Trump’s message in Aurora, a city that has become a central part of his campaign speeches in the final stretch to Election Day, marks another example of how the former president has escalated his xenophobic and racist rhetoric against migrants and minority groups he says are genetically predisposed to commit crimes. The supposed threat migrants pose is the core part of the former president’s closing argument, as he promises his base that he’s the one who can save the country from a group of people he calls ‘animals,’ ‘stone cold killers,’ the ‘worst people,’ and the ‘enemy from within.’”
- Analysis from David Smith in The Guardian: “The Republican presidential nominee held a campaign rally in Aurora on a stage adorned with posters displaying mugshots of people in prison-orange uniforms with descriptions including ‘illegal immigrant gang members from Venezuela’. Trump told the crowd: ‘I’m announcing today that, upon taking office, we will have an ‘Operation Aurora’ at the federal level to expedite the removals of these savage gangs.’ He pledged to invoke the Alien Enemies Act, a 1798 law that allows the president to deport any non-citizen from a country that the US is at war with … The remark recalled past dehumanising language in which Trump claimed undocumented immigrants were ‘poisoning the blood of our country’ and, earlier this week, suggested that those suspected in homicide cases ‘have bad genes’.”
- Michael Tomasky column in The New Republic, “The Media Has Three Weeks to Learn How to Tell the Truth About Trump”: “Donald Trump keeps getting worse and worse. Last Friday in Aurora, Colorado, he gave a speech that was both bonkers and fascist, asserting that the city—where crime is down 17 percent—had been ‘conquered’ by Venezuelan gangs and announcing that he’d use a 1798 law to deport them. Sunday morning, he said on Fox that ‘the enemy within’ who might be planning any Election Day chaos—’sick people, radical left lunatics,’ but presumably for the most part citizens of the United States—should be handled by the National Guard or even the military.”
- Media analyst Brian Stelter on CNN: “Everyone who paid attention in high school history class knows that Trump’s anti-immigration language is the language of fascists and white supremacists throughout history.”
- Columnist and blogger Paul Waldman writes in his Substack column today, “In short, eight or even four years ago, it was reasonable to say that for all his odiousness, Donald Trump was not really a fascist. But that is no longer tenable. At this moment, with just three weeks to go before election day, there is no better or more useful term to describe him and the threat he presents.”
