I would normally say that he doesn’t care if white supremacists take his words as permission to kill immigrants. But at this point I think he might feel they are helping his cause. After all, his campaign was already pushing the “invasion” line and have said they have no plans to stop:
There is no evidence that Mr. Trump’s Facebook ads directly influenced the author of the manifesto, who wrote that his views “predate Trump” and posted the document on 8chan, an online forum known as a haven for extremists. But Mr. Trump, through his speeches, tweets and campaign ads, has elevated the idea of an “invasion,” once a fringe view often espoused by white nationalists, into the public discourse.
Some other Republican candidates have echoed Mr. Trump’s language in their own ads. “Let’s call this what it is — an invasion of our country,” read a recent Facebook ad for Tommy Tuberville, a former Auburn football coach who is running for Senate in Alabama. Other Republicans who have used the word “invasion” in Facebook ads include a candidate for governor in West Virginia and a candidate for Senate in North Carolina.
The cognitive linguist George Lakoff said the word “invasion” was a potent one for Mr. Trump to use because of what it allowed him to communicate. “If you’re invaded, you’re invaded by an enemy,” he said. “An invasion says that you can be taken over inside your own country and harmed, and that you can be ruled by people from the outside.”
[White extremist ideology is connected to some of the deadliest shootings worldwide in recent years.]
Mr. Lakoff added: “When he’s saying ‘invasion,’ he’s saying all of those things. But they’re unconscious. They’re automatic. They’re built into the word ‘invasion.’”
For the writer of the manifesto, the concept of an “invasion” had an additional, racist meaning: He promoted a conspiracy theory called “the great replacement,” which claims that an effort is underway to replace white people with nonwhite people.
Democratic candidates for president blamed Mr. Trump for helping spread such views. “White supremacy is not a mental illness,” Senator Elizabeth Warren of Massachusetts said on Monday. “We need to call it what it is: Domestic terrorism. And we need to call out Donald Trump for amplifying these deadly ideologies.”
[President Trump faced new criticism after the El Paso shooting.]
But the radio host Rush Limbaugh attacked Democrats and the news media on Monday for pointing the finger at conservatives like him. “We’re sick and tired, every time this happens, people that we believe in being blamed for it,” he said. “We’re sick of it. None of us pulled the trigger, none of us want these things to happen, and yet we turn on the media and that’s what we hear.”
Stoking fear about immigrants has been central to the Trump campaign’s advertising strategy since it first began airing political commercials during the 2016 race.
The campaign’s first ad of that election focused on “radical Islamic terrorism” in the wake of the mass shooting in San Bernardino, Calif., and showed footage of people seemingly flooding across a border. (The footage was from Morocco, not the United States.) Mr. Trump also proposed a “total and complete shutdown of Muslims entering the United States” after the attack.
Scenes evoking illegal immigration became common during the 2016 effort, and Mr. Trump painted a picture of an America overwhelmed by immigrants. “We don’t have a country right now,” he said in footage shown in one ad. “We have people pouring in, they’re pouring in, and they’re doing tremendous damage.”
The use of alarmist language and imagery about immigrants has a history in the modern Republican Party that dates back to the divisive political battles over illegal immigration in the 1990s. One of the most infamous depictions of migrants as a threat came from a 1994 ad from Gov. Pete Wilson of California that showed a group of people rushing through a border crossing. “They keep coming,” the announcer said.
Since then, images of shadowy figures climbing fences or prowling around in the dark have been a staple of Republican campaign ads, often used by candidates whose districts and states are far from any border. In 2014, for example, Senator Pat Roberts of Kansas ran an ad that was typical of the Republican messaging at the time, warning of “a border crisis” that was “taking jobs away from Kansans.”
Mr. Trump’s takeover of the party gave those kinds of messages a higher platform and a larger mouthpiece as conservative media outlets like Fox News amplified his words.
He seized on the “invasion” imagery in the run-up to the 2018 midterm elections, when he claimed without evidence that a caravan of migrants making its way north toward the border had been infiltrated by “criminals and unknown Middle Easterners.”
The president and fellow Republicans warned of waves of violence, drugs and crime that awaited the country if it were led by Democrats, who were portrayed as supporting policies that would weaken national security.
It didn’t work in 2018 but their doubling down on this theme after the election indicates that they are convinced it will work in 2020 anyway.
He will never stop saying it. If he read the shooter’s online screed he would find little to argue with.
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