President Donald Trump was excited to launch his 2020 campaign where he'd tout his economic successes and attack Democrats as socialists. The problem, however, is that the economy has tanked, and Trump ushered in the largest government funding measure in history.
The Guardian reported Sunday that the only thing he has left is racism and xenophobia.
"Trump this week announced in a late-night tweet that he would 'temporarily suspend immigration' into America. Two days later, when he signed an executive order, it only applied to people seeking green cards to move to the country permanently, not to temporary workers, and there were plenty of loopholes," the report said.
While immigrants are willing to do hard labor on farms, ranches, as housekeepers or other services, it's doubtful that white Trump supporters would be willing to pick tomatoes for $1,000 a month or less.
Trump was elected in 2016 by an electorate that supported a nativist and populist agenda. When he tried it in 2018, it had mixed results, and the Republicans lost the House.
"This is a president who doesn't use the dog whistle of Republicans in the past, and even Democrats in the past who used dog-whistle politics to talk about race in code," The Guardian cited Juan Cartagena, of Latino Justice. "This guy talks about it openly. Under normal circumstances, he would have been a one-term president, but his base is pretty loyal, and we're still talking about a country that barely comes out in large turnout numbers."
Trump hasn't been able to show results from his first term. Despite the GOP owning the House and Senate in his first two years, Trump never got his border wall funded, along with many other broken promises.
"What we should expect in 2020 is, because of the economic implosion, because of his massive mishandling of this crisis, he will pursue a xenophobic campaign that makes the 2016 effort look like patty cake," said Neil Sroka, of the progressive group Democracy for America.
Read the full report at The Guardian.
