Donald Trump wants you to feast your eyes on the migrant parade because this is a big fat gift to his particular brand of national populism.
Do you know why you’re watching an immigrant caravan move across Mexico toward the United States?
Because Donald Trump wants you to.
In fact, Trump has used a series of angry tweets to make this story national and international, blowing on the embers every few hours with new comments to make sure the flame burns bright.
He wants you to feast your eyes on the migrant parade as it moves through Mexico to El Norte, because this is a big fat gift to his particular brand of national populism. For Trump’s purposes, it’s a stirring visual that will last at least a month — the estimated time it will take the throng of 1,200-1,500 to reach the U. S.-Mexico border.
Here’s why the politics work for Trump and Trump only. And why the Democrats are laying low:
We may be at the lowest ebb for illegal immigration since 1971, but so long as a mass of people are marching for the U. S. border, Trump can breathlessly describe this as a threat to our sovereignty, one so serious we will need to militarize the border and harden it with steel.
And does Trump ever need that steel edifice to appease the base. His failure to win congressional authorization for the wall has let down his most committed followers.
Provocateur and sometimes Trump supporter Ann Coulter expressed this recently when she said, “He’s failing right now. The presidency isn’t over yet, he can still come back and do it. But people who voted for him shouldn’t be cheering for him every time he betrays them and… it’s a total betrayal for him not to build the wall.”
Now he has a new reason to talk about the wall. To pine for a wall. To push Congress to build one.
If there is an immigrant horde stampeding toward the U. S.-Mexico border, there has to be someone to blame, and Trump blames Mexico. He argues Mexico’s indifference to U. S. self-determination prevents it from stopping the caravan.
One Mexican town after another has been helping the migrants, reports Reuters, but there’s an ulterior motive. “The authorities want us to leave their cities,” said Rodrigo Abeja, an organizer from Pueblo Sin Fronteras, to CNN. “They’ve been helping us, in part to speed the massive group out of their jurisdictions.”
Earlier this week Trump threatened to repeal the North American Free Trade Agreement because Mexico is not helping to stop the flow of migrants into the United States:
« Cash cow NAFTA is in play, » tweeted Trump, « Congress MUST ACT NOW! »
It wasn’t so long ago that Donald Trump demanded that countries that facilitate illegal immigration lose their foreign aid. With today’s caravan in full tilt, Trump is back, announcing he wants to cut off foreign aid to Honduras (where the migrant parade originated) and “the countries that allow this to happen” (meaning Mexico).
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During the presidential campaign, Trump endlessly railed against political correctness. Now some foolish remarks from the migrant caravan will let him pull that trumpet out of his satchel.
The procession’s organizing group, Pueblo Sin Fronter, circulated a press release this week saying, “We demand of the United States … that they open the border to us because we are as much citizens as the (American) people are.”
At the same time they demand entry, they also blame the United States for their exodus. « These (migrants) are fleeing violence, and they’re fleeing situations created by the United States, » organizer Alex Mensing told the Los Angeles Times. « This is not a horde of illegal immigrants. This is a refugee crisis. »
In a statement, Pueblo Sin Fronter wrote « the high percentage of people fleeing Honduras in the group are the result of multiple political crises in the region provoked in large part by the policies of the US government. »
Is it possible these are Trump plants in the migrant parade? The messaging could not be more perfectly pitched to arouse the fury of his base.
When Trump gave his State of the Union, he said, “Americans are dreamers, too.” It was an appeal to blue-collar people, in particular card-carrying union members of the Democratic working class. He was essentially saying, “Let the Democrats be the party of immigrants, of outsiders. I’ll tend to your needs.
It was an insidious message because it sold out “dreamers,” a cohort of young Latinos once embraced by the Republican mainstream. Trump picks up the theme this week with a swipe at the left. “Our country is being stolen!” he says, pointing his finger at the Democrats and accusing them of wanting “No Borders, hence drugs and crime!”
Trump is likely to roll with this theme into the mid-term elections. The longer the caravan lasts the longer he can blame it on the Democrats and the Mexicans, or as Trump might put it, on the Democrats and their constituents.
Phil Boas is editorial page editor of The Arizona Republic, where this first appeared .
