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 neighbourhoods 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.
Side-by-side images ― captioned “Your Neighbourhood Under Trump” and “Your Neighbourhood Under Kamala,” respectively ― show a tranquil residential street and a 2023 Getty photo of recent migrants to the US sitting outside New York’s Roosevelt Hotel in hopes of securing temporary housing. (The Roosevelt now serves as an intake centre for homeless migrants, and has been described as a “new Ellis Island.”) Most of the migrants in the photo are people of colour.
Even as Harris and the Democrats shift to the right on border security and immigration issues, the Trump campaign has doubled down on racial animus and anti-immigrant sentiment.
In a conversation with X owner Elon Musk on the platform Monday night, Trump repeatedly vilified immigrants, bringing up cases of alleged murders by undocumented migrants. “These are rough people,” Trump told Musk. “These are criminals that make our criminals look like nice people. And it’s horrible what they’re doing.”
Trump has, once again, made building a wall on the US-Mexico border a campaign priority, and has promised that his administration will deport every undocumented immigrant living in the US. At the Republican National Convention in July, attendees cheered and waved signs reading “Mass Deportations Now!”
In the three weeks since President Joe Biden announced he wouldn’t seek a second term, reports have suggested that Trump is flailing for ways to counter the swell of enthusiasm for Harris, now the Democratic nominee.
Racism is a go-to approach for Trump, as evidenced by his quest over a decade ago to “prove” that then-President Barack Obama was not born in the US. Some of his advisers have told the media in recent weeks of their plans to rerun the “Willie Horton” playbook, referring to an infamous ad from 1988 that supporters of Republican George H.W. Bush produced for his presidential campaign against Democrat Michael Dukakis. (Trump’s current pollster and adviser Tony Fabrizio had a hand in that advertisement.)
According to The New York Times, Republican donors and Trump’s own advisers have been pleading with him to attack Harris’ policies and stay on message, instead of questioning whether she is actually Black, as he has repeatedly done in the past two weeks. The fear among conservatives is that blatant racism will drive voters away in November.
But it seems that even when attacking Harris’ immigration policies, the Trump campaign just can’t help itself.