Trump—An Unprecedented Threat To America & Biden Has Been Utterly Incapable Of Protecting Us From It

I Hope Kamala Will Do A Better Job; He Belongs In Prison

Have you noticed that Trump’s rhetoric is more racist, more xenophobic, more fascist and, over all, a lot darker than it used to be? Keen observation but you’re not alone. In fact Politico has a whole story about it. Myah Ward wrote that Señor T “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.’ He is no longer just talking about keeping immigrants out of the country, building a wall and banning Muslims from entering the United States. Trump now warns that migrants have already invaded, destroying the country from inside its borders, which he uses as a means to justify a second-term policy agenda that includes building massive detention camps and conducting mass deportations.” And it’s always about “Kamala has imported an army of illegal alien gang members and migrant criminals from the dungeons of the third world… from prisons and jails and insane asylums and mental institutions, and she has had them resettled beautifully into your community to prey upon innocent American citizens.”

The whole standup routine at his rallies “has veered more than ever into conspiracy theories,” divisiveness and demonization of minority groups, using increasingly dark, graphic imagery to talk about migrants. And he does that in every single speech he makes now— no exceptions. “It’s a stark escalation over the last month,” wrote Ward, “of what some experts in political rhetoric, fascism and immigration say is a strong echo of authoritarians and Nazi ideology.” Ruth Ben-Ghiat: “He’s been taking Americans and his followers on a journey since really 2015 conditioning them … step by step instilling hatred in a group, and then escalating. So immigrants are crime. Immigrants are anarchy. They’re taking their jobs, but now they’re also animals who are going to kill us or eat our pets or eat us. That’s how you get people to feel that whatever is done to them, as in mass deportation, rounding them up, putting them in camps, is OK.”

“What is so jarring to me is these are not just Nazi-like statements. These are actual Nazi sentiments,” said Robert Jones, founder of the Public Religion Research Institute, the author of  The Hidden Roots of White Supremacy and a vocal critic of Trump’s rhetoric. “Hitler used the word vermin and rats multiple times in Mein Kampf to talk about Jews. These are not accidental or coincidental references. We have clear, 20th century historical precedent with this kind of political language, and we see where it leads.”

He’s also amped up the ugly personal attacks that have long been part of his brand and that thrill the morons who adore him. On Saturday, the NY Times reported he told GOP fat cats that Kamala is retarded. Forget thathe's projecting again; expect this kind of ugly behavior to get much worse in the next 3 weeks.

Naomi Lachance and Asawin Suebsaeng reported that “Trump is planning to amp up his violent, fascist rhetoric all the way to Election Day.” He has admitted to close confidantes that  “he can’t— as some advisers apparently would like him to— play it safe in these final weeks of campaigning. He thinks that would be a prescription for losing. He says “he needs to slam his foot on the gas… especially on immigration… [which] helps explain Trump’s recent diatribes, which have included talking about dictatorship, repeatedly lying about and demonizing migrants, and encouraging police to be extra violent in ways that resemble The Purge.”

Trump says “he pays close attention to which lines his rally audiences eat up the most and cheer the loudest at— and that Trump specifically noted how his rally attendees applauded and whooped when he reiterated his much-maligned pledge to be ‘dictator for one day.’... The crowd roared with approval.” Yep, that’s who goes to the MAGA rallies… but that isn’t what normal American voters think; at least I hope not. 

“Remigration,” wrote Lachance and Suebsaeng, “is an idea popular among the far-right in Europe that refers to forcing all immigrants back to their native countries, a form of ethnic cleansing. These threats came as Trump pushed racist lies about Haitian migrants in Springfield, Ohio. He said, falsely, that they were eating cats and dogs. On Tuesday, Trump said that Springfield’s Haitian migrants, who are mostly there legally, are ‘illegal immigrants as far as I’m concerned.’ He previously pledged to ‘do large deportations from Springfield.’”

During a conversation with Frank Bruni last week, Chris Christie said “inside my party in particular, there is no longer the water’s edge. Everything is politicized. And when you add to it not only Trump’s willingness but seeming inability to avoid lying about everything— the combination of the two are toxic to the political environment generally, but they are really toxic to the human environment in a disaster… No one’s life is more important to him than his. It’s really that simple. I mean, it’s not that he doesn’t get it. He does get it, but he makes a value judgment that in the grand context of things, his life and his circumstance are the most important thing in the world… [I]n the end, he is a selfish child. And he doesn’t care that these people in North Carolina are suffering the way they are, if caring costs him one bit of perceived political advantage… I saw [cognitive] decline in his skills in ’20 from ’16, and you see significant declines still. What masks it is that he is still physically pretty vibrant and energetic, unlike the president. But if you listen to him and his ability to make a point, it’s not nearly as good now as it was in 2016, not nearly.” 

And, of course, all his assertions are build on lies. Yesterday, PBS reported that his conspiracy theory that immigrants are stealing “Black jobs” when he’s in Michigan, Wisconsin, Georgia and North Carolina,” and “Hispanic jobs,” when he’s speaking in Arizona and Nevada, and both when he’s in Pennsylvania,  is another Trumpian lie. “Government data show immigrant labor contributes to economic growth and provides promotional opportunities for native-born workers. And a mass deportation event would cost U.S. taxpayers up to a trillion dollars and could cause the cost of living, including food and housing, to skyrocket, economists say.”

Janiyah Thomas, the director of Team Trump Black Media, told The Associated Press that Democrats “continue to prioritize the interests of illegal immigrants over our own Black Americans who were born in this country” and that Biden-era job gains in the labor market were primarily due to illegal immigration.

The latest U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics Current Population Survey data shows that as of 2023, native-born Black workers are most predominantly employed in management and financial operations, sales and office support roles, while native-born Latino workers are most often employed in management, office support, sales and service occupations.

Foreign-born, noncitizen Black workers are most often represented in transportation and health care support roles, and foreign-born, noncitizen Hispanic workers are most often represented in construction, building and grounds cleaning.

In 2023, international migrants — primarily from Latin America — accounted for more than two-thirds of the population growth in the United States, and so far this decade they have made up almost three-quarters of U.S. growth.

After hitting a record high in December 2023, the number of migrants crossing the border has plummeted.

The claim that immigrants are taking employment opportunities from native-born Americans is repeated by Trump’s advisers. They often cite a report produced by Steven Camarota, research director for the Center for Immigration Studies, a right-leaning think tank that seeks a reduced immigration flow into the U.S. The report combines job numbers for immigrants in the U.S. legally and illegally to reinforce the claim that foreigners are disproportionately driving U.S. labor growth and reaping most of the benefits.

Camarota’s report states that 971,000 more U.S.-born Americans were employed in May 2024 compared to May 2019, prior to the pandemic, while the number of employed immigrants has increased by 3.2 million.

It is true that international migrants have become a primary driver of population growth this decade, increasing their share of the overall population as fewer children are being born in the U.S. compared with years past. That’s according to the U.S. Census Bureau’s annual American Community Survey.

Economists who study immigrant labor’s impact on the economy say that people who are in the U.S. illegally are not taking native citizens’ jobs, because the roles that these immigrant workers take on are most often positions that native workers are unwilling to fill, such as agriculture and food processing jobs.

Giovanni Peri, a labor economist at the University of California, Davis, conducted research that explores the impact of the 1980 influx of Cuban immigrants in Miami (the so-called Mariel Boatlift) on Black workers’ employment. The study determined that the wages of Miami’s Black and Hispanic workers moved above those in other cities that did not have a surge of immigrant workers.

Peri told the AP that the presence of new immigrant labor often improves employment outcomes for native-born workers, who often have different language and skill sets compared to new immigrants.

In addition, there are not a fixed number of jobs in the U.S., immigrants tend to contribute to the survival of existing firms (opening up new opportunities for native workers) and there are currently more jobs available than there are workers available to take them. U.S. natives have low interest in working in labor-intensive agriculture and food production roles.

“We have many more vacancies than workers in this type of manual labor, in fact we need many more of them to fill these roles,” Peri said.

Stan Marek, who employs roughly 1,000 workers at his Houston construction firm, Marek Brothers Holdings LLC, said he has seen this firsthand.

Asked if immigrants in the U.S. illegally are taking jobs from native-born workers, he said, “Absolutely not, unequivocally.”

“Many of my workers are retiring, and their kids are not going to come into construction and the trades,” Marek said. He added that the U.S. needs an identification system that addresses national security concerns so those who are in the country illegally can work.

“There’s not enough blue-collar labor here,” he said.

Data also shows when there are not enough workers to fill these roles, firms will automate their jobs with machines and technology investments, rather than turn to native workers.

Dartmouth College economist Ethan Lewis said, “There is a vast amount of research on the labor market impact of immigration in the U.S., most of which concludes the impact on less-skilled workers is fairly small and, if anything, jobs for U.S.-born workers might by created rather than ‘taken’ by immigrants.”

…Peri says a deportation program would cost the U.S. up to a trillion dollars and would result in massive losses to the U.S. economy. The cost of food and other basic items would soar.

“They are massive contributors to our economy and we wouldn’t have fruits and vegetables, we wouldn’t have our gardens,” he said, if the deportation effort comes to fruition.