Republicans have reportedly been pleading with Trump to stay on message — but his campaign just can’t seem to help itself.
On Tuesday, an official social media account of Donald Trump’s 2024 campaign posted a racist meme implying that if Vice President Kamala Harris wins the presidency in November, nice suburban neighborhoods will be overrun with hordes of Black people and immigrants.
“Import the third world. Become the third world,” read the post on X, the former Twitter.
Don’t be misled by articles written by committed Democrats for committed Democrats. No one who reads the Huffington Post is even considering voting for Trump.
This is a succinct restatement of the Republicans’ successful message on immigration, not some crazy Trumpism or verbal gaffe. Current Democratic immigration policy is not popular and if I were advising Trump, this is exactly the sort of thing I would suggest he should say. Almost no one offended by it would have voted for him anyway, and aggressively pounding the Democrats on immigration is not just useful in its own right but also distracts Trump from saying things that actually do harm him.
Trump doesn’t need to win over his base - he, strategically, needs to win over independents. Open racism isn’t popular… the old “Ey took er jerbs” messenge will always resonate well but his level of demonizing immigrants has been classically unpopular - especially the “Criminals and rapists” style lines.
Here’s hoping he keeps up the racist uncle bullshit and turns off voters.
My feeling is that this message attacks foreigners rather than Americans of of any race. The foreigners in question are mostly Hispanic so I can see how it will be perceived as racist by some people, but just as Trump doesn’t have to win over his own base, he also doesn’t have to (and can’t) win over Harris’ base. Are the people who perceive this as racist already people who would never have voted for him anyway?
As a side note, Biden’s immigration policy isn’t even popular with Hispanics. I expect that most of them don’t prefer Trump’s policy, but Hispanics can be nativists too.
If this was there normal fear mongering of “look at this ms-13 member who raped and killed 5 kids” then yeah a normal person would probably get scared at that and want trump for immigration. But this is just a bunch of black people chilling, they aren’t brandishing weapons or rioting or anything out of order. This literally only caters to people who feel threatened by the mere existence of black people, ie. Racists.
That picture was taken near where I live in Manhattan. The issue of migrants has been very divisive even here in NYC, a Democratic stronghold where over a third of the population was born outside of the USA and blacks and Hispanics together make up about half the population. Overall, the majority of New Yorkers still hold pro-immigration views, but 41% of New Yorkers want to build Trump’s wall. (50% are opposed and the rest are undecided. This data is from the Siena College survey.)
I can’t find data specifically about the attitudes of black New Yorkers but according to nationwide data from PRRI:
Note that that’s before the peak of the migrant influx.
I suspect that you’re underestimating how many Americans, including immigrant Americans and black Americans, oppose the current immigration policy. I’m not saying that the majority of them will be happy with Trump’s depictions of immigrants, but enough might be for this to plausibly increase support for Trump even among Americans who aren’t native-born whites.
I don’t doubt that people don’t like migrants, but most people don’t like them because they “cause crime” or “take jobs” ( problems way smaller then the right wing media narrative about them) but the people in this photo are doing neither. These people are just existing as people of color which only upsets people who don’t like migration simply because it allows more people of color to exist in the u.s. The people who don’t like migrants because of that are racists and a minority of Americans, at least I hope they are.
Ask yourself why is the second photo bad and the first one good?
I’ll be honest, I do think that the photo looks pretty bad. I wrote my original comment in this thread after reading the text of Trump’s tweet but without loading the image, and after seeing the image I agree that it looks a lot more racist than what swing voters want to see. The funny thing is that usually most of the people at that shelter are lighter-skinned Hispanics, not blacks. I suppose that makes the picture even worse…
I think it’s interesting and important for Democrats to look at statistics about the attitudes of minorities towards immigrants, but I shouldn’t have done that here.
Trump was worse on immigration than biden by right wing standards, biden has deported far more and trump blocked border reform that was bipartisan because it would be bad for his reelection if the problem was solved (not speculation, really what he said)