Republicans have reportedly been pleading with Trump to stay on message — but his campaign just can't seem to help itself.
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.
Someone is selling that corrugated plastic with Trump signage printed on it and a couple houses have zip tied them to every possible place that can. The houses look like campaign adverts, it's crazy.
Trump, you traitorous dipshit, you have personally done more to move the US towards "third world" status -- by threatening to withdraw from NATO -- than literally any other person in history!
Third world haha. How does an entire media team use a term from world war 1 discerning whether a country was allied/axis/neither, instead of the modern terms 'developed and developing' which we learnt about in high school geography.
I hate to break it to you (especially since I agree with your overall point), but you've got a bit of a "glass houses" issue going on with your criticism:
"First/Second/Third world" is Cold War-era terminology ("Second World" was [Eastern Bloc|communists]).
WWI was the [Entente|Triple Entente|Allies] vs. the Central Powers, not the Axis. Allies vs. Axis was WWII.
The black dude living next to me is the quietest neighbor I've ever had. This guy waits until the afternoon to mow his yard. The maga drooler on the other side often is firing up his mower at 6 in the morning and neighbor behind my house mows and uses a gas leaf blower until ten or eleven at night sometimes.
Oh its not race, its assholes all the way down. Problem with the leaf blower neighbor is that they are not in the city limits. So I would have to call the sheriff and they wont do anything. They think they are real muricans and my long haired hippy ass is some communist.
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:
from 2017 to 2021, the percentage of Black Americans who favored building a wall at the southern border of the United States rose, from 15% to 34%. Yet this percentage is significantly lower compared to the general population (45%).
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.