Trumpolini draws his most diehard, in-the-bunker voters from people that hate immigration. It is a particular obsession for his most faithful cult members, and it’s not a coincidence that when he rode down that golden escalator and declared his first Presidential run 10 years ago he put special emphasis on immigrant bashing.
He caught their eye with that, and captured their hateful, shriveled hearts with “Build that Wall!” chants, ideas like an electrified fence or alligator surrounded border moat, or policies like separating parents and kids at the border as an odious “deterrent” for coming to America at all. So why do these people care about building Alligator Alcatraz over their own economic interests like tariffs, Medicaid cuts, losing federal jobs (a good employer in red states or rural areas), grant freezes, farm subsidy cuts, FEMA’s dismantling, higher food prices, social security office closures, etc. ?
—Some of these people have been created by a steady diet of Fox News, which talked NON STOP about the “Biden border crisis,” often showing footage of roving hordes of immigrants walking towards the border during completely unrelated stories. Ironically, much of the corporatized anti-immigrant talk has been driven by powerful Australians like Rubert Murdoch or white Africans like Elon Musk or Cuban-Canadians like Ted Cruz or Trumpf himself (German paternal grandfather and Scottish mother), but that appears to be lost on MAGA.
—Some of these people have been told since the early Reagan administration that the Great Brown Wave was going to swallow them whole, making this a majority Hispanic nation. Welp, that was almost 50 years ago, and it still hasn’t happened yet. Nearly 20% of your country’s entire existence is kind-of a long time to wait for a doomsday event, but the sheer existential panic of becoming a minority in America has driven them half crazy on the immigration issue. [Are minorities treated badly in America or something?]
—And some of them are just the same bigots that always follow rightwing thoughts on immigration. Every fascist leader ever has bashed the hell out of immigration—”cultural destroyers poisoning the blood of the country” this and “prowling criminals raping the women” that. It’s textbook authoritarian; practically Dictator 101. It’s not random that every far-right party in Europe hits on the issue of immigration. There have even been countless anti-immigrant movements in this country like The Chinese Exclusion Act, the Know Nothing Party, the original America First movement of nazi sympathizers, and even the Founding Fathers worried about “too many” German immigrants and too much French influence. That’s perhaps lost on Trumpf when he’s “inspired” by John Adams’s Alien and Sedition Acts.
All this put together may help explain the insanity of people who have just lost their jobs or healthcare cheering Trumpolini on as he builds a personal gestapo out of a bloated ICE budget, and even crazier prison system in the country that’s already the most over-incarcerated on Earth.
Oh, and now is about the time we receive straw-man arguments from MAGA devotees screaming about how “there’s a difference between legal immigration and illegal immigration!” which they don’t truly believe as Trump has relentlessly targeted legal immigration programs like the diversity immigration lottery, immigration from over a dozen African and Middle Eastern nations, student visas, tech worker visas, Dreamers, asylum claims, refugee status for groups like Haitians who are here legally, birthright citizenship, deporting even legal immigrants to foreign prisons in countries they are not from, wanted to “pause” immigration altogether, and even floated attacking naturalized citizens which is nearly 10% of the entire country.
Also, Trump wasn’t too caught up on the particulars of illegal immigration when he committed visa fraud to bring Melania here or hired illegal workers for his own properties. So the whole “we only want to stop illegals!” argument doesn’t really track with what Trump’s actually doing, and the relentless monster he’s actually been towards legal immigration.