In a series of campaign appearances in states with primary contests to choose the Republican presidential nominee on March 5 (dubbed “Super Tuesday” because of the large number of delegates up for grabs), the Republican frontrunner made his most toxic appeals yet to fascist and racist sentiments.
Trump focused on demonizing migrant workers, as well as attributing to President Joe Biden and the Democrats the destruction of democratic rights which he himself plans to carry out if he wins the election next November 5.
These were the ex-president’s first public appearances after he and Biden both traveled to the US-Mexico border last week, and Biden appealed for Trump’s support for the anti-migrant bill approved by the Senate on a bipartisan basis but blocked in the House under pressure from Trump. The likely Republican candidate made no reference to the bill or to Biden’s appeal for his help in getting it passed.
The invective directed against migrants was extraordinary in its blatantly racist character and its explicit endorsement of the fascistic “Great Replacement Theory,” which claims a liberal-Jewish conspiracy to flood the country with immigrants from Asia, Africa and Latin America who will supposedly “replace” the native white population of the United States.
While he did not invoke the neo-Nazi conspiracy theory by name, Trump elaborated its basic outlines, claiming that the Biden administration was knowingly “aiding and abetting” an invasion by a virtual army of migrant criminals in order to shift the country’s demographic balance. The Great Replacement Theory has been publicly voiced by a series of racist mass murderers—in New York, Pennsylvania, Texas and elsewhere
“Biden’s conduct on our border is by any definition a conspiracy to overthrow the United States of America,” he said in Greensboro, North Carolina. “Biden and his accomplices want to collapse the American system, nullify the will of the actual American voters and establish a new base of power that gives them control for generations.”
Later, in Virginia, he said of the Democrats and migrants, “They’re trying to sign them up to get them to vote in the next election.”
Seeking, in his usual fashion, to accuse his political opponents of what he is planning himself, he charged that Biden was engaged in a “conspiracy to overthrow the United States of America” and was “the real threat to democracy.” Using language that incorporates the legal definition of treason, a capital crime under US law, he declared that “every day, Joe Biden is giving aid and comfort to foreign enemies of the United States.”
Such language is aimed at inciting violence against political opponents, not only Biden and his fellow Democrats, but those who oppose both Biden and Trump from the left. Trump made repeated references to Marxists, socialists and communists, who would be targets of his wrath if he were again installed in the White House.
Trump began both his North Carolina and Virginia rallies by playing a recording of “Justice for All,” a rendition of the US national anthem recorded by a group of fascists who engaged in the attack on the US Capitol on January 6, 2021 and are now in prison for their crimes. These offenses include both assaulting Capitol Police officers and disrupting an official proceeding—the congressional certification of Trump’s defeat in the Electoral College by a sizeable margin, 306-232. (Biden also won the popular vote by seven million votes.)
“Ladies and gentlemen, please rise for the horribly and unfairly treated January 6 hostages,” the ex-president declared. The “J6 Prison Choir” was then heard singing while Trump recites the Pledge of Allegiance.
The Biden campaign responded to Trump’s latest diatribes—on the eve of primaries that will likely clinch the Republican presidential nomination for him—not by warning of Trump’s dictatorial course but by criticizing him for pressuring House Republicans to block the legislation passed by the Senate that would pour billions into repressive measures along the US-Mexico border. These include the hiring of thousands of additional Border Patrol agents and immigration judges and the revival of most of the anti-migrant policies carried out by the Trump administration.
Biden’s campaign issued a statement that declared:
Once again Trump is projecting in an attempt to distract the American people from the fact he killed the fairest and toughest border security bill in decades because he believed it would help his campaign. Sad.
Some quotes from Trump’s speech in North Carolina, wildly applauded by a few thousand supporters, give a sense of the openly racist character of his appeal and his use of Nazi-like language. He claimed Biden was turning “public schools into migrant camps” and “the USA into a crime-ridden, disease-ridden dumping ground.”
He made a phony expression of concern over the death of 22-year-old Georgia nursing student Laken Riley, whose alleged killer is a Venezuelan migrant claiming asylum and fighting deportation. Trump said he had spoken to the parents and blamed Biden for her death.
He painted a picture of military-aged men flooding across the border from countries like the Congo and China. “They are all from the ages of 18-29,” he declared. “What the hell is going on with that? That is called military fighting age.”
He reiterated his longstanding and entirely fabricated claim that other countries had emptied their prisons and asylums and sent the inmates to the United States, comparing the migrants to Hannibal Lecter, the fictional serial killer in a series of Hollywood films.
He continued:
That’s why a central question in this election is whether the foreign armies Joe Biden has smuggled across our border will be allowed to stay, or whether they’ll be told to get the hell out of here and go back home. We’ll take them back home.
Trump again raised the question of the languages spoken by migrants. At the Virginia rally he railed against “pupils from foreign countries, from countries where they don’t even know what the language is.” In his visit to the US-Mexico border Thursday, he said that migrants coming into the US were speaking “truly foreign languages. ... Nobody speaks them.”
Last week, he told the Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC), “We have languages coming into our country. We don’t have one instructor in our entire nation that can speak that language … they have languages that nobody in this country has ever heard of. It’s a very horrible thing.”
Trump’s all-purpose answer to this supposed threat is repression. He repeated a pledge to begin mass deportations on the day he is sworn in as president. He said:
It will happen quickly. Local police … know every one of them. Everyone says, how are you going to do that? We are giving our policemen immunity from prosecution.
This would be the beginning of a political purge of the entire country, directed not only against Trump’s political opponents in the corporate political establishment such as Biden and the Democrats but above all against the working class.
But as the Biden campaign’s comments make clear, the Democrats will neither speak the truth about Trump nor take any action beyond supporting the various lawsuits and criminal prosecutions now slowly wending their way through the court system. Their overriding concern is to win the support of their Republican “friends” in Congress, most of whom have already endorsed Trump, for stepped-up US military aid to Ukraine.
The defense of democratic rights, like the struggle against imperialist war, can only be mounted by the working class, which must undertake a political offensive against Trump, the Democrats and the capitalist political establishment as a whole, on the basis of a socialist program.