| | | Demosthenes
“Here’s one critical data point I want to flag your intention to. Natalie Martinez, a researcher at Media Matters, flagged yesterday that since May 2018 President Trump’s reelection campaign has run roughly 2,200 Facebook ads using the word “invasion.” Unsurprisingly, a quick perusal suggests they’re all about immigration – namely, a Mexican and/or South American “invasion” of the United States which can only be prevented by President Trump and his wall.
Of course, the messages are laced with references to crime, sex trafficking and all the rest. The simple fact is that President Trump’s own political messages, often seen in the coarsest form in his Twitter feed but more consistently and sometimes in a more rancid form in his campaign’s targeted social media campaigns, is hard to distinguish from the “Great Replacement” racist incitement we read on various far-right sites and mass murderer’s manifestos.
It is not too much to say that the President’s own reelection campaign functions as a sort of white nationalist hate group and is a path to or accelerant toward radicalization for significant numbers of people. (This tally tells just part of that story.) This isn’t really a surprise. We’ve been living in this world for four years now. But everything does appear to be accelerating, both the attacks and the incitement.
The essential point I keep returning to is that President Trump clearly believes that his reelection hopes are firmly tied to keeping his core supporters at a constant boil of fear and anger – fears of immigrant invasions, fear of crime, anger at the Democrats who he claims are making the horrors possible. In the most basic and cynical sense his political calculation may be correct. Regardless, we should expect and prepare for fifteen months of escalation as he tries to light his core supporters on fire and polarize the population in a way that makes another skin of his teeth victory possible.“
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