We have officially entered the manic stage of the presidential election in which the candidates are suddenly everywhere. At least Kamala Harris is everywhere. She’s holding huge raucous rallies all over the swing states, appearing on podcasts and mainstream interviews even going on Fox and subjecting herself to a barrage of hostile Trump inspired accusations from anchor Brett Baier who didn’t seem to want her to actually answer them. (She showed she cannot be intimidated which was probably the point of the interview in the first place.) Nobody at this point should complain that she isn’t being available to the public. Just turn on your TV and you’ll see her there.
Trump, on the other hand, is as present as always by holding looney rallies and post on crazy comments on Truth Social, but is refusing to debate Harris again and has cancelled numerous scheduled interviews this week. Yet he’s holding events in California and New York which aren’t even on the radar.
According to Tara Palmieri at Puck, the Mar-a-lago insiders say this is all because Trump is so assured he’s going to win that he’s just letting his freak flag fly and the campaign figures that Trump’s “self-assurance” may create a bandwagon effect as voters decide they want to go with a winner. Republicans do love the bandwagon effect strategy, but Trump is seeming off his rocker in a way that doesn’t easily read as “confident” except to the extent he may believe his “election integrity” plans will ensure that he “wins” even if he doesn’t win.
Trump did do some events this week and it’s a big leap to say he showed self-assurance. There was the now notorious “swaying to the music” town hall that I wrote about earlier. That appearance was so bizarre that it actually managed to dominate the conversation for a couple of days which is really saying something in this frenzied news cycle.
Then he held a taped Fox News town hall with host Harris Faulkner, who sat him down with a group of allegedly undecided women. We know that a large majority of women voters in this country loathe him and they’d like to mitigate that by allowing him to beguile a few of them with his suave charm. They did seem rather weirdly ecstatic by his presence, but that’s because they were all Republican party shills and ardent supporters brought in by Fox. It even turned out that Fox edited out one of the questions that gave away the scheme.
But Trump did do one event this week that may turn out to be important because of the substance of what he said. He appeared on the Spanish language network Univision for a town hall with Latino voters. I think we all know what an important demographic this is and have heard that Trump is garnering a larger percentage of Hispanic men than ever before. I suspect he believed that it would, therefore, be an easy exchange like the one with the women plants the day before. So he wasn’t prepared for the kind of questions he got.
A man named Ramiro Gonzales, who identified as a Republican, asked Trump why he should support him when people from his own administration, including his Vice President, refuse to do so? He said January 6th and his COVID mismanagement had disturbed him but he wanted to give him a chance to win back his vote.
Trump replied that 97% of people in the former administration supported him and said that January 6th was “a day of love”, “nobody was killed”, and “we didn’t have guns, the others had guns but we didn’t have guns.” You can see from the look on Gonzales’s face and that of the people in the audience, that they knew he was full of it.
Gonzales later said that he would not be voting for Trump.
Trump has been charged with several felonies related to the January 6th insurrection. He claims that he bears no responsibility for any of it. And yet here he said that “we” didn’t have guns, the others had guns, by which he can only mean the police. One imagines that Special Prosecutor Jack Smith will be looking at that footage with keen interest. (Needless to say, there were plenty of guns among the rioters and certainly many of those whom Trump calls “hostages,”and promises to pardon on day one, were charged with violent acts against the police. )
But there was another question that interested me the most because I’ve been dying for someone to ask it for months. A 64 year old man named Jorge Velazquez, who described himself as having spent many years working with his hands “hunched over picking strawberries and cutting broccoli”, asked Trump who he thought was going to do this type of work if he deported all the undocumented workers who account for most of the agricultural work force.
Trump went into his usual rant about criminal immigrants, showing once again that he is completely clueless about how anything actually works. Trump seems to think they’re taking the jobs away from American citizens, specifically “African Americans and Hispanics” who are suffering as a result. These are the “Black jobs” he was talking about.
Trump made a point of saying that he wants laborers (who love our country) to come legally which suggests he’s talking about something like the old bracero program which was replaced by the issuance of H-2a and H-2b visas. The problem is that his agenda, as articulated in Project 2025, wants to discontinue all temporary worker visas. His immigration guru, Stephen Miller, has made it very clear that he intends to drastically curtail legal immigration as well.
Trump’s grotesque xenophobic rhetoric, whether or not he fully understands it, is paving the way for the GOP’s mainstream adoption of “The Great Replacement Theory” which holds that all foreigners from the so-called “shithole countries” must be barred, not just because they are criminals or are taking all the “Black jobs” but because they are supposedly destroying the culture of America. When Trump reads Stephen Miller’s screeds on the stump about immigrants “poisoning the blood,” there is no distinction between legal and illegal.
His new best friend Elon Musk is pushing the Great Replacement Theory constantly, having signed on to the idea that Democrats are trying to import immigrants so they will vote for them, an old standby promoted by the likes of Ann Coulter in her book “Adios, America.” One would think that with all the talk about Latinos voting in large numbers for Trump this time they’d stop and think about whether this is a good long term strategy for them but they’re so hooked on the idea that migrants are marauding gangsters who are also inexplicably motivated beyond reason to vote, that they aren’t thinking clearly on the subject.
On a more material level, I have to wonder how everyone’s going to like the prices at the grocery store when strawberries and broccoli are necessarily selling at 20 times what they cost today from the combination of labor shortages and tariffs on imported food. Trump may not ever eat a vegetable but I’d guess even Republicans like to eat a salad once in a while.
While I doubt that Trump’s ever read a treatise on The Great Replacement Theory, he’s fully on board with it and we know that because he’s recently promised to deport the Haitian immigrants in Springfield despite the fact that they are here legally, are working at jobs that others didn’t want and profess to love America. He believes they’re polluting the culture of Springfield Ohio and need to go back where they came from. That’s what this is all about. And that, my friends, is fascism with a capitol F.