Donald Trump has been spreading hateful lies about immigrants throughout his political career, but he has intensified those bogus attacks in the final weeks of his 2024 campaign — and analysts see evidence that his message is hitting home.
The former president has falsely claimed at his rallies that Venezuela and other Latin American nations have been emptying their prisons and sending criminals into the United States, but MSNBC's Joe Scarborough said there's simply no evidence to support those allegations.
"Study after study after study, year after year after year shows the same thing," Scarborough said. "Crime rates among immigrants are lower than crime rates among native-born Americans. This campaign has been reduced now to three things, and he's doing it because obviously he thinks it works.
"Number one, he's talking about illegal immigrants and he's saying that America is being destroyed by this invasion of illegal immigrants when he was the one that killed the bill that would have given us the toughest border security that we've ever had in the United States, and he said he killed it for political reasons."
"Then he talks about tariffs, goes higher and higher with the tariffs number, which hurts the middle class because they're the ones going to pay the tariffs," Scarborough added. "And the third thing he talks about is how he's going to deploy the Justice Department to arrest people and then stifle speech he doesn't like. That's his closing message and, again, up to this point, it seemed to be working very well with his base, because we are tied right now and we are tied because his base has come back home."
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Jonathan Lemire, the White House bureau chief for Politico, agreed that the false claims about criminal immigrants seemed to be boosting his poll numbers against Vice President Kamala Harris.
"He is lying — he's lying about migrants, about crime, about the crimes committed by immigrants," Lemire said. "That's his closing argument, the rhetoric is getting more dangerous and darker and it might just be working — his base is coming home.
"It's still a tight race, no one is saying it's over by any means, but the Harris momentum of a month or two back does seem to have dissipated and Trump is closing on the claims of migrants that aren't true. The Republican mayor of Aurora, Colorado, fact-checked him and said how he depicts this is not true. 'Claims about the Venezuelan gang activity in our city, state, have been grossly exaggerated and have hurt the city's identity and sense of safety.'
"This is an unreality that Trump is propagating but the right-wing media is backing him up."
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