At his rallies, former President Donald Trump abruptly changes the subject: from tariffs he can jump to immigration policy and then to the problems of electric vehicles. But it usually returns to the same apocalyptic message.
“They will no longer have a country”Trump warned at a rally in Las Vegas last month. “They are very close to not having it. Their only hope is that they elect me.”
It is a prediction that Trump has made repeatedly in speeches, interviews and on social media during the year he has been campaigning to return to the White House. Although he has long used fear as a tool to agitate his conservative base and influence undecided voters, Trump has taken his doomsday prophecies to a new extreme, increasing both their frequency and reach.
He often predicts that if he loses to Vice President Kamala Harris in November, the United States will be devastated. World War III will break out, likely leading to a global nuclear catastrophe. There will be no more United States. Israel will cease to exist. Gangs of murderous immigrants will invade cities, small towns, the state of Colorado and the entire country. Factories will close. Farmers will lose their farms. The United States will face an economic “bloodbath.”
Donald Trump (REUTERS/David Swanson)
During a speech Saturday in Wisconsin, Trump declared that immigrants “will come into your kitchen, they will cut your throat” and that “your towns, your cities, your country is being destroyed”. He stopped after 20 minutes to lighten the tone of his disastrous rhetoric.
“Isn’t this a wonderful and inspiring speech?” Trump asked jokingly, to which the audience reacted with a chuckle. “There are people sitting in the front row saying, ‘Oh my God.’ They thought they would be jumping. ‘Let’s make America great again.’ Let’s do that too. Don’t worry, we’re not there yet. I’m just saying. “This is a very dark speech.”
Karoline Leavitt, a spokeswoman for Trump’s campaign, defended Trump’s language and said it reflected his view of the dire reality facing the country. On inflation, crime and the fentanyl crisis, Leavitt said Trump “recognizes the declining state of our country and offers an optimistic vision for the future in order to make America safe, secure and wealthy again.” .
Trump has used fear as a driving force throughout his political career. In 2016, he stoked tensions over immigration by calling Mexican immigrants “assassins” y “rapists”. And during his 2020 campaign he took the same tone when he raised concerns about urban crime to try to appeal to white suburban voters.
During his third race for the White House, Trump has revived his alarmist predictions and extended them to the entire globe.
Trump at an event in Milwaukee (REUTERS/Carlos Barria)
In almost all of his speeches, Trump warns that the United States is on the brink of a world war that only he can prevent. Trump falsely claims to have presided over an era of world peace and maintains that continued Democratic leadership will prolong the conflicts in Ukraine and the Gaza Strip with devastating effects.
Last week, he sparked concern about a U.S. ground war when he falsely claimed to hundreds of people in North Carolina that President Joe Biden and Harris “won’t be satisfied until they send American kids to Ukraine” to “die on the other side of the world.” ocean”. Biden has expressed his opposition to doing so.
And at most rallies this year, Trump has warned that there will be a calamitous nuclear conflict if he doesn’t win in the fall. “They are going to end up in World War III,” he said at the Las Vegas rally. “They are going to have a nuclear holocaust if we are not careful. “These people have no idea.”
Sarafina Chitika, a spokeswoman for Harris’ campaign, accused Trump of hiding his lack of politics behind his rhetoric.
“Donald Trump cannot sell the American people anything but darkness and lies”, he noted in a statement. “Instead of offering solutions, he peddles conspiracy theories and criticizes our country.”
Even so, Trump continues to reserve his most negative predictions for the issue of immigration.
In his campaign this year, Trump has taken advantage of a surge in the number of undocumented immigrants crossing the border during the Biden administration. Although that increase has slowed significantly in recent months, Trump continues to portray immigrants as an invasive force bent on destroying the United States and often distorts facts or data with allusions to an “immigrant crime wave” that national statistics do not support. .
Ignoring that a substantial portion of immigrants are families with children, Trump generally characterizes those crossing the border as violent criminals or mentally ill. He has repeatedly compared unauthorized immigrants to Hannibal Lecter, the fictional serial killer and cannibal from “The Silence of the Lambs,” and has even baselessly claimed that other countries deliberately emptied their prisons and “asylums” to send those populations to the United States.
More recently, screens at his rallies have shown images with alarmist captions during his speeches.
One of them, shown at several campaign events and shared by the Trump campaign on social media, appears to be a digitally generated depiction of a man with a knife stalking a woman in a dark alley, with the caption: “No one is safe with Kamala’s open borders.” Another references his debunked claims that a Venezuelan gang took over an apartment complex in Aurora, Colorado. It’s an image of tattooed Latino men with the caption: “Your new administrators if Kamala is elected.”
In two recent speeches aimed at appealing to Jewish voters, he predicted that Israel would cease to exist within two years if he lost in November. “If I don’t win, I think Israel will be eradicated, and they can’t let that happen,” he said. He then urged a rabbi present in the room to “call everyone together and get them to vote.”
