America's Civic Pyromaniacs
Donald Trump and JD Vance have disqualified themselves from high office with their incendiary demagoguery
My latest exchange with Chris Cillizza about the state of the presidential race is pretty lively. I hope you’ll hop on over to Chris’ excellent Substack to read it (and hopefully subscribe while you’re there).
I don’t want this Substack to become a place for predictable and repetitive rants against Donald Trump. In my post about last week’s presidential debate, I gave into the temptation to rail against the Republican nominee and express despair and disgust that he’s holding his own in the polls against Democrat Kamala Harris.
Normally, I wouldn’t follow a post like that with another focused on the awfulness of Harris’ opponent. But this hasn’t been a normal week. Led by the strenuous efforts of Trump’s running mate, Ohio Sen. JD Vance, the Trump campaign has remained sharply focused on immigration—and not just on the nearly 2,000-mile abstraction of “the border” with Mexico. The shift, which began during the debate itself, when Trump decided to spread an unverified xenophobic and racist rumor about Haitian immigrants in the small city of Springfield, Ohio eating the household pets of its white residents, has continued over the days since last Tuesday, even as Springfield public schools were forced to close and a local university curtailed events in response to bomb threats.
Trump and Vance don’t appear to care that they are using the deafening megaphone blast of a presidential campaign to spread civically poisonous, incendiary lies. Or rather, Trump doesn’t appear to care. Vance, by contrast, seems positively committed to the strategy of saying anything and everything without regard for its truth in order to bring more Americans around to his position on immigration, or to distract from the losing subject of abortion, even if it inadvertently provokes a pogrom. As Vance told CNN over the weekend, “If I have to create stories so that the American media actually pays attention to the suffering of the American people, then that’s what I'm going to do.”
(This quote sparked a heated debate on Sunday, with Vance himself denying it implied he was deliberately and knowingly spreading lies. I agree that it more likely signals an indifference to the truth of the various “stories” he creates and promotes for political gain.)
In a way, I’m grateful that Trump and Vance have moved in this direction over the past week, because American voters should be made to understand what a second Trump administration would be like. It would use demagogic lies to whip up support for hiring thousands of new Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agents, who would be deployed throughout the country (perhaps assisted in places by far-right paramilitary groups) to round up millions of immigrants and put them into large camps, where they would be processed and then summarily expelled from the country.
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