'Dark' Trump rhetoric is 'playing roulette with real human beings': Financial Times column

Financial Times columnist Edward Luce believes that former President Donald Trump and Sen. J.D. Vance (R-OH) are making explicit ethnonationalism the center of their campaign -- and he's not sure that it's a losing bet.

In his latest column, Luce outlines how Trump and Vance have knowingly lied about Haitian immigrants in Springfield, Ohio as a means of distracting the public from Trump's disastrous debate performance and forcing the American media to cover immigration, which polls show is Trump's strongest issue.

Luce also notes that Trump, who once insisted he was only opposed to illegal immigration, has now shifted his target to people who are in the country legally.

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"His dark rhetoric masks a calculated bet," he writes. "Trump’s first campaign was based on federal incompetence: the US, he said, should uphold the rule of law by policing its southern border. His revised case is that US lore must be defended from outsiders. American culture needs protecting from unwanted strangers, even if they are legal."

Luce acknowledges that this tactic is morally reprehensible but, given how many times Trump has used racist rhetoric without paying a political price, he's not sure that this will be the time voters finally say enough is enough.

"Trump and Vance are playing roulette with real human beings," he concludes. "But elections are not morality contests. Their cynicism over the stolen pet myth may not be as self-harming as it looks."