Trump speaks at a campaign event on Sept. 28, 2024, in Prairie du Chien, Wis.Morry Gash/AP
For much of 2024, Donald Trump has used demagoguery against migrants to campaign for the White House. In numerous recent speeches and media appearances, he has continued to inveigh about an alleged “invasion” coming across America’s southern border. He has falsely claimed that hordes of violent and “insane” foreigners have been taking over “hundreds” of cities and raping and killing “thousands of Americans.” His repeated vows to deport millions of undocumented immigrants draw roars of approval at his rallies.
Inflaming Americans’ fears about immigration and border security was a hallmark of Trump’s presidency and previous campaigns—and his extreme rhetoric, as I’ve previously reported, has marked spasms of violence, including a horrific mass shooting in 2019 in El Paso, Texas. Earlier this month, he and his running mate, JD Vance, magnified racist lies about Haitian immigrants supposedly stealing and eating pets in Springfield, Ohio—provoking a wave of fear, bomb threats, and major disruption in that community.
Now, in the final weeks of the presidential campaign, Trump’s rhetoric about migrants has grown even darker and more foreboding. In three campaign speeches since Friday, he conjured disturbing images of mayhem and death and spoke of the nation as if it’s on the brink of destruction. With no basis in reality, he blamed this cartoonishly grim portrait of American carnage on his opponent, Vice President Kamala Harris.
“She let our American sons and daughters be raped and murdered at the hands of vicious monsters. She let American communities be conquered,” Trump said at a rally in Michigan on Friday, emphasizing, “They’re conquering your communities.”
“These migrants,” Trump said the following day in Wisconsin, “they make our criminals look like babies. These are stone-cold killers. They’ll walk into your kitchen, they’ll cut your throat.”
In a lengthy diatribe that followed, he falsely claimed that Harris had “let in 425,431 people convicted of the worst crimes.” (This was one of several ways in which Trump wildly distorted recently released data from US Homeland Security covering a 40-year period.) He declared that these were legions of criminals who “Kamala set loose to rape, pillage, thieve, plunder and kill the people of the United States of America.”
“Lock her up!” shouted someone in the crowd.
Trump further railed against Harris as being “mentally disabled” and supposedly responsible for tens of thousands of murderers pouring into the country. “I’ve been saying this for three years,” he went on, soon adding: “She’s letting in people who are going to walk into your house, break into your door, and they’ll do anything they want. These people are animals.”
Later in the speech, he again highlighted alleged violence by “illegal aliens” and declared: “I will liberate Wisconsin from this mass migrant invasion of murderers, rapists, hoodlums, drug dealers, thugs, and vicious gang members. I will liberate our nation.”
Trump even used an impromptu moment to dehumanize migrants in ugly terms. He claimed that English was fast disappearing from the schools in Springfield, Ohio, and warned that if Harris is elected president, towns in Wisconsin and all over America “will be transformed into a third-world hellhole.” As he continued, a fly apparently landed on the podium.
“Oh, there’s a fly,” he said, shooing it away, his tone turning sardonic. “I wonder where the fly came from.”
The crowd erupted with laughter.
“See, two years ago I wouldn’t have had a fly up here,” he said, grinning. “You’re changing rapidly.”
He delivered more of the same on Sunday in Pennsylvania: “The massive number of savage criminal aliens that Kamala Harris has allowed to invade our country, this is an invasion.” He further claimed, “Last week a lot of people came in from the Congo, a big prison in the Congo in Africa. Welcome to the United States.”
“Send ’em back!” a person in the crowd yelled angrily.
This was all building to a specter of national demise—an invasion, Trump claimed, that will be larger than half the size of the current US population.
“Wait till you see what’s going to happen,” he said. “Oh, and if I don’t get in, it’s going to be the worst thing that this country has ever suffered…you’ll have 150, 200 million coming, you will have, this country will no longer be recognizable.”
That rhetoric is indistinguishable from the “Great Replacement” ideology that motivated the mass shooter who attacked in El Paso when Trump was in the White House.
As I have reported previously, dehumanizing a population by provoking feelings of contempt and disgust—whether it’s Trump smearing migrants for spreading flies, “eating the dogs,” or “poisoning the blood of our country”—increases the likelihood that his extremist followers will commit acts of violence. The danger from this type of incitement, documented in behavioral science research, has been rising with Trump’s rhetoric, according to threat assessment and national security experts I’ve spoken with in recent weeks. As one source put it, “We’ve already seen where this goes, and it can easily go there again.”
While America faces profound challenges with immigration, a top issue with voters, Trump’s depictions are as demonstrably false as they are deeply troubling. Immigrants commit crime at lower rates than native-born Americans, extensive research shows. The nation has experienced a sharp decline in violent crime under the Biden-Harris administration, according to FBI data. And recently, migrant encounters at the border dropped to the lowest level in four years.
It is important to recognize that Trump’s demonizing rhetoric is clearly by design. He is well known for improvising as he talks and wandering off on long tangents that turn bizarre and incoherent. But much of the incendiary rhetoric above was written into Trump’s speeches. He read it from a teleprompter.
When I reported in August on this demagoguery from Trump, I contacted three of his senior campaign advisors separately, asking them for comment about experts’ concerns that Trump’s rhetoric could provoke further violence. None of the them responded, nor did they reply to my follow-up requests for this story.
