Alex Brandon/AP Photo
On the Blue Room Balcony of the White House on Saturday
You don’t have to search too far for answers for why Donald Trump is faltering at the polls right now. Over 214,000 people are dead of COVID-19, millions have lost their jobs since March, and the White House has been turned into a hotspot. I don’t think you have to plumb much more deeply than that. But something else is missing from the Trump re-election campaign: the sense of mission that propelled him forward in 2016.
From the moment Trump descended the golden escalator, he had one message to impart to his supporters: push back the hordes coming over the southern border. I’m oversimplifying a bit, but the first Trump campaign was largely this uncomplicated. Trump may have been speaking to the economic suffering of some left-behind areas, or an imagined lack of respect on the global stage. But this was all united under a vision of locking people with dark skin out of the country, building a wall, and protecting the threatened status of white Americans. This was the message that beat a dozen and a half challengers in the Republican primary and it’s what ultimately beat Hillary Clinton where it mattered the most. By whipping up resentment for immigrants, Trump became the 45th president.
Where has that campaign been? Why has that rallying cry been absent?
Stroll, if you dare, through Trump’s twitter feed, effectively his main form of communication, in the last week, and you won’t read a single tweet about immigration or the border. The rallies name-check key immigration policies on occasion but it’s not the main thrust. In 2016, the debate moderated by Chris Wallace featured a detailed 11-minute segment on immigration policy that touched on crime, border security, drug interdiction, deportations, a path to citizenship for the undocumented, worker exploitation, and the wall on the Mexican border. In this year’s Wallace-led debate, none of this came up.
Trump’s transformation of immigration policy has been disastrous for the country and will take a concerted effort to reverse.
The administration has belatedly tried to use announcements at the Department of Homeland Security to revive Trump’s immigration message, but it’s taken a back seat to antifa, leftist protesters condemning police brutality, and other boogeymen. When raising fears about the destruction of the suburbs and the breakdown of law and order, Trump rarely brings up immigrants.
Part of this erasure of Trump’s signature policy in the last campaign is a result of his presidential campaign leaking oceans of water and trying to bail out by defending his indefensible actions on coronavirus. There isn’t much room for anything else. But you’re also seeing the inevitable shift from the outsider to the insider, from running on a promise to running on a record.
The Trump campaign does feature a mini-site on immigration, citing a series of “promises kept.” Let’s just suggest that it’s not in the style of Trump’s preferred mode of messaging. It’s an antiseptic series of bullet points about handling fewer border crossings and signing various executive orders and building a certain number of miles of wall.
If he wanted to, Trump could tell a better story than that. Outsourcing the details to his aide de camp Stephen Miller, Trump has eradicated large elements of not just illegal, but legal immigration, especially for those who seek asylum in the United States. The travel ban has expanded to 13 countries with heavily Muslim populations, and the refugee program has slowed to a trickle. Hundreds of thousands of immigrants in America under temporary protected status have been asked to leave. Even so-called skilled workers eligible for H-1B visas have been curtailed.
Annual net migration of any kind has been cut almost in half, to roughly the levels of the 1980s. The base cruelty of family separation, done deliberately as a form of deterrent, we have now learned, will leave a lasting stain on the republic. And since the pandemic, the border has been effectively closed, proving a more durable policy than the administration’s ham-handed and frequently overturned attempts at restrictionism.
In short, if Donald Trump wanted to tell a story that he has vanquished immigrants and the associated problems he claims that they bring with them, he plausibly could. But Trump the showman knows that his political viability has been predicated on raising fear rather than easing concern. He’s ranted about American carnage for so long that projecting success seems almost irrelevant.
Moreover, the “success” that would be touted here is too unpopular to highlight. Gallup’s historical trends show that the desire for an increase in immigration levels at a high-water mark going back to 1966. A May poll showed respondents agreeing that immigration is a good thing for the country by a whopping 77-19, up 6 points from when Trump was elected. Even sentiment on Central American refugees, who have been as demeaned by Trump as any group in the world, is quite positive on allowing them into the country, by a 57-39 margin.
Both Trump and Joe Biden have targeted Latinos during the campaign, and immigration has not been part of the pitch. Latinos for Trump, needless to say, ignores the migration issue. Biden did an event with Latino leaders in East Las Vegas on Friday and his message was little different than messages for any other group: Latino vulnerability to the coronavirus, closures of Latino-run businesses, school closures that effect children of Latino origin, the importance of voting, and so on.
Trump’s transformation of immigration policy has been disastrous for the country and will take a concerted effort to reverse. Trump’s relative silence on immigration in the campaign reflects that this is another agenda where Republicans must now hide their intent. Trump’s full-barreled rhetorical assault on immigrants during the 2018 midterms led to an historic defeat. This year, he’s put that talk aside, leaving his campaign formless and without a rallying point.
The work of grassroots groups to resist the immigration devolution paid dividends with public opinion. This is a quiet but critical aspect of the 2020 dynamic. Trump still plays to Americans’ basest instincts. But he’s found certain levels of xenophobia to hot to tackle in public. And he hasn’t figured out how to deploy right-wing populism from the pedestal of power.
