US elections

Donald Trump made his way to the White House in 2016 on the back of a xenophobic and racist speech and believes that this is the best way to regain the presidency eight years later. The Republican candidate has redoubled his bet with allusions to the “bad genes” that criminal immigrants are bringing to the country, two words that he continually associates. Trump has made irregular immigration the scapegoat for all the problems that afflict the United States, without caring about resorting to hoaxes. It is not a new strategy, not even in this campaign, but the former president has made it the axis around which all his messages revolve, whether to talk about crime, economic problems or even help for hurricane victims. Helene.

Trump dedicated himself to spewing lies about the response to the devastating storm, including that President Joe Biden ignored the response and was “sleeping” without picking up the phone to the governor of Georgia, Republican Brian Kemp, something that he himself denied it. He also floated the baseless idea that the government was leaving Republican-majority areas without help. But the message he has insisted on most is the falsehood that the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) had run out of money because funds had been diverted to undocumented immigrants.

“It is categorically false. It’s not true. “It is a false statement,” White House spokeswoman Karine Jean-Pierre responded at a press conference. His denial was of no use, nor that of the Agency itself, nor that of the Department of Homeland Security, nor even that of the “Republican” president of the House of Representatives, Mike Johnson. Trump continued to spout that lie and take out of context the fact that the first initial emergency aid to those affected is $750 per person to maintain that that is all they were going to receive.

The former president already demonstrated in the debate with the Democratic candidate, Kamala Harris, that he did not care whether an accusation was true or not as long as it fit into his political narrative that immigrants are invading the United States because of Joe Biden’s Government. and his vice president and are the cause of almost all the evils. That’s when he blurted out: “In Springfield [Ohio]those who have entered are eating the dogs, they are eating the cats. They are eating the pets that live there. “This is what is happening in our country, and it is a shame,” he said.

Next to Springfield, another town lends itself particularly well to the former president’s objectives and was also referred to in the debate. This is Aurora, a city of 400,000 inhabitants in Colorado. A large number of immigrants have arrived in the area and there are real problems of insecurity and unhealthiness in degraded areas, which in reality already existed before the last wave of migration. But the Republicans, with Trump at the helm, have ridden on the back of a hoax that fit their purposes like a glove, despite the damage it caused to the city.

A video showing armed men on the landing of a staircase in a building in Aurora helped the Republicans maintain that gangs of Venezuelans, particularly the so-called Aragua Train, were violently taking over entire areas of the city. city. After the flight that occurred, there were interests of the company that owns the three-building complex where the video was recorded and its resistance to rehabilitating it. He found the perfect excuse in the Venezuelan gangs and the images of the landing were broadcast in a loop incessantly on conservative channels, especially Fox News.

How much Aurora

It is also true, however, that authorities are concerned about the activity of the Aragua Train, not only in Aurora, but also other parts of the country, including New York. That provides a perfect breeding ground for Trump’s message. The former president has said that the mass deportation of immigrants that he plans to launch if he returns to the White House will begin in Springfield and Aurora.

The Trump campaign has announced in an apocalyptic tone a rally for its candidate in the city of Colorado for this Friday. “Aurora, Colorado, has become a ‘war zone’ due to the influx of violent Venezuelan gang members imprisoned by the Aragua Train. With approximately 43,000 migrants flooding into the neighboring city of Denver since December 2022, many of these migrants have arrived in Aurora, bringing chaos and fear. “Local families have been forced to flee their homes as members of the Tren de Aragua terrorize apartment complexes with guns, robberies, and rampant drug activity,” their call reads. “Kamala’s border bloodbath has turned all states into border states, leaving Colorado families at the mercy of crime,” he adds.

In a radio interview broadcast on Monday, Trump insisted on his xenophobic messages, linking immigration and crime and stating that the arrival of immigrants had brought “bad genes” to the United States. His campaign later said he was referring to criminals, not immigrants in general. “What about allowing people to come in across an open border, 13,000 of whom were murderers? Many of them murdered many more than one person,” Trump said. “And now they live happily in the United States. You know, now a murderer… I believe this: it’s in his genes. And we have a lot of bad genes in our country right now.” The statistics cited by Trump are for immigrants who have entered the country for decades, including his tenure.

On Sunday, at the rally he gave with Elon Musk in Butler (Pennsylvania), where he had suffered an attack in July, he maintained that all over the world they are emptying prisons to send their “murderers, drug traffickers, human traffickers and gang members” to the United States as immigrants. “They are releasing everyone in our country, and they are emptying their prisons,” he said.

The White House spokeswoman criticized Trump on Monday for his statement: “That type of language is hateful, disgusting, inappropriate and has no place in our country,” she said at a press conference. The former president has spoken in the past that immigrants are “poisoning the blood” of the United States, paraphrasing none other than Adolf Hitler.

Harris recalled Monday in an interview on the show 60 Minutes, of the CBS network, that his rival torpedoed a bipartisan agreement in the Senate to pass a border security law. “Donald Trump found out that this bill was in the works and could be passed, and he wants to ride on a problem instead of fixing a problem,” he said. “I think the American people want a leader who will not try to divide us and demean us,” he added.

The 2024 United States presidential elections have become an action and suspense film in which the intrigue about the outcome remains completely alive after several unexpected script twists. There is still a month of footage left until voting day and the narrative seems somewhat stagnant. In the absence of any major news and in the face of the technical tie that the polls point to, the two presidential candidates, Republican Donald Trump and Democrat Kamala Harris, are battling tirelessly in the seven states that have the keys to the White House. The attacks intensify. Trump wades through the mud of insults and incessant lies, while Kamala Harris also enters the field of personal disqualifications with the help of Republicans who deny the former president.

After this week’s debate between the vice presidential candidates, there is no date especially marked on the agenda until the day of the vote itself, November 5, the Tuesday following the first Monday of the month, as mandated by the Constitution. What lies ahead is a long-distance race full of rallies and an unprecedented advertising bombardment, since the campaigns of both candidates have their bags full.

The campaign has been full of surprises that have turned expectations upside down. The president, Joe Biden, in his quest for re-election, thought that a good performance in an early morning debate against Trump could clear up doubts about his ability to lead the country for four more years, despite the fact that he would renew the position at 82 years old. . It failed miserably. When he went from the phase of denial to that of acceptance, he handed over the baton to Kamala Harris, the first presidential candidate of one of the two major parties since 1968 to be crowned candidate without having participated in the primaries. Harris breathed fresh air and filled the Democratic campaign with enthusiasm.

Opposite, Donald Trump has suffered two attempts to end his life. In the first, in Butler (Pennsylvania), he escaped being murdered by a matter of centimeters. In the second, at his golf club in Florida, he was not in imminent danger. Trump spoke about how he experienced the attack that injured his ear in his acceptance speech at the Republican convention and assured that he would not speak about it again. He hasn’t stopped doing it. This Saturday, in fact, he returns to the crime scene to hold a rally in exactly the same place where he was shot and will be accompanied by the richest man in the world, Elon Musk.

Crossing of insults

Trump and Harris have greeted each other only once, in the debate between them on September 10 and which ended in victory for the Democrat. The former president has refused to participate in new face-to-face meetings, so the duel between the two takes place at a distance. Trump has descended into the realm of insult: “Corrupt Joe Biden became mentally deficient. Sad. But liar Kamala Harris, I honestly think she was born that way. Something’s wrong with Kamala. And I don’t know what it is, but there’s definitely something wrong with him, everyone knows,” he said last weekend in Erie, Pennsylvania. In addition, he has tried to politicize the response to the hurricane with lies about Biden and Harris Helene, which has left at least 215 dead.

Harris, for her part, has disqualified Trump as someone who “violated his oath to defend the Constitution,” in reference to his refusal to accept his 2020 defeat and the assault on the Capitol. To do this, she had former congresswoman Liz Cheney as a guest on Thursday at a rally in Ripon (Pennsylvania), the birthplace of the Republican Party. It was the Republican who took on the dirty work of the insult by calling Trump “petty, vindictive and cruel.”

Donald Trump, this week in Valdosta (Georgia), one of the areas hit by Hurricane ‘Helene’.Michael M. Santiago (Getty Images)

In the midst of this extreme polarization, the former president plays the card of xenophobia, racism and fear, blaming immigration for all evils. Republicans also insist on inflation and the alleged threat that Harris represents to the economy, the issue to which voters give the most importance. Trump apocalyptically describes a country that is sinking, with a continuous invasion of illegal immigrants turning cities into a hell of insecurity.

Events are actually working against them. Border crossings have fallen drastically with the latest measures approved by Joe Biden’s Government. And in the economy, although the price increases over the last four years weigh on citizens’ spirits, the elections come at a sweet time. In September, 254,000 jobs were created and unemployment fell to 4.1%, once again chasing away the specter of a recession. Inflation has fallen to 2.5% and salaries have been gaining purchasing power for many months. The Federal Reserve has begun to lower interest rates, consumer spending remains buoyant, and the economy is growing healthily. Even the threat of a long dockworkers’ strike that would strangle the supply chain has evaporated.

What has become complicated is the international situation, with the wars in Ukraine, Israel and Lebanon. Arab Americans remain outraged by the Biden administration’s support for Israel and it is not clear that Harris can escape a punishing vote – or abstention –, especially in Michigan, one of the key states in which the difference in the polls is narrow

Political scientists often refer to the “October surprise” as an unforeseen event or revelation that arises close to the election and can change the course of the campaign. This year, however, after the historic surprises of June, July, August and September, the bar is very high. The month began with the rare support of Melania Trump, the candidate’s wife, for abortion and with the dissemination of a devastating prosecutor’s report with new evidence about Trump’s “desperate” attempts to steal the 2020 elections. The voters However, they seem cured of their horror and the Republican, the first convicted felon with a chance of being elected president, has managed to clear his judicial agenda until after the elections.

Whoever wins, she will make history, either as the first president to regain office after losing it since Grover Cleveland in 1892 or as the first woman—and black—to occupy the Oval Office since the founding of the country, even if there is no made neither her race nor her sex a campaign issue. Both candidates present themselves as agents of change, but both have already had the responsibility of Government to different degrees.

After the frenetic action of the summer, the plot of the election film is now moving slowly. The plot thread is repeated and the polls are almost frozen. They grant a victory in the popular vote to the Democrat, but are inconclusive in the electoral college, which elects the president. What keeps viewers in suspense is the suspense, which will not be resolved, at least, until the week of the elections, without any post-credits scenes being ruled out.