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Marc Short, who served as Vice President Mike Pence’s chief of staff during the Trump administration, has in the past been critical of his former boss’s former boss. When Donald Trump disparaged former Cabinet official Elaine Chao — who resigned from Trump’s administration after the Capitol riot — Short noted that the comments constituted a “racial slur.”
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In response to Trump’s comments over the weekend in which the former president raged that immigrants were “poisoning the blood” of the United States, though, Short offered a figurative shrug.
Trump has an advantage over President Biden in the polls, Short noted. And besides, “I think it’s highly unlikely that Donald Trump has ever read ‘Mein Kampf,’ ” Adolf Hitler’s 1925 manifesto. This had the effect of neutralizing a central focus of the criticism Trump has faced for his comments: that they echo Hitler’s rhetoric.
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But that’s not the issue, in part because it’s relatively easy (as it was for Short) to otherwise differentiate Trump from the German dictator. The issue, instead, is that Trump’s language shows how much and how far hostility to immigration has evolved and grown in the United States — thanks largely to Trump himself.
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The 2016 presidential election was a crucial pivot point in American history, not only because of Trump’s unexpected victory. It was a period in which the extreme right gained new power and prominence — again, not only because Trump won. That included extreme anti-immigrant rhetoric.
In 2014, there was a surge in immigration to the United States, driven by young people seeking safety from violence in Central America. The Obama administration scrambled to contain it and Republicans were eager to exacerbate the Democratic president’s difficulty.
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But this didn’t occur in a vacuum. It happened as violence in the Middle East pushed immigrants into Europe, stoking anti-immigrant sentiment there. It came at a point when the Republican Party was already facing backlash from its base in the form of the still-potent tea party, a backlash focused on undermining the party’s establishment. It also came as the establishment, trying to figure out how to respond to President Barack Obama’s unexpected 2012 reelection, was exploring taking a more lenient approach to immigration.
All of this occurred as Americans were newly cognizant of how the country’s demography was changing. The Census Bureau’s determination that White Americans would lose majority status in future decades “lit the fuse” on concerns about immigration, in one demographer’s description — a determination that overlapped with Obama’s election in the first place.
Trump didn’t generate hostility to immigration from thin air when he announced his candidacy in 2015; he was echoing and elevating what had already been burbling in right-wing media. Immigration was a clear dividing point between establishment and fringe Republicans, and Trump’s rhetoric was a clear message to that growing, powerful fringe. Post-election analysis determined that the news outlet that earned the most shares from Republicans and those on the right during the 2016 cycle wasn’t behemoth Fox News, which had long been closely allied to the establishment. Instead, it was Breitbart News.
From 2013 to 2016, nearly 6 percent of the Breitbart articles indexed by Google mentioned immigration or the border. At Fox News’s website, less than half a percent did.
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Breitbart’s executive chairman, Stephen K. Bannon, went to work for Trump after he was inaugurated as president. His rhetoric mirrored that of his site; immigration was one of his focal points in the White House. This was someone who had lamented that a fifth of the country was made up of immigrants, which it wasn’t and isn’t.
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Bannon was further down the fringe-right track than Trump, but the president was following behind. Trump’s election empowered anti-immigrant voices, as was manifested in Charlottesville in August 2017. White nationalists rallied there, at one point chanting that “Jews would not replace us.” The “us” was White people, and the chant, too, was just a bit ahead on the path.
Trump’s election marked the end of the battle between the establishment and the right-wing fringe. The fringe had won. The establishment fought to demonstrate its fealty to Trump’s base, which meant the most-right-wing elements of the electorate.
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That included Fox News. The channel, eager to appeal to the Trump-loyal constituency, shifted to focus more heavily on immigration. That included boosting Trump’s efforts in the middle of his administration to build a wall and repeatedly elevating “concerns” about immigrants shortly before elections.
Trump reprises dehumanizing language on undocumented immigrants
In the same month that Trump won the election, the network elevated Tucker Carlson to host a prime-time show. Carlson, like Bannon, spoke the language of the fringe right, even if it wasn’t as apparent at the outset. He and his team (which included several people later linked to white nationalism) increasingly elevated framing and stories that were popular in fringe-right, anti-immigrant conversations. That framing would trickle up to the White House.
It was Carlson who made “great replacement theory” — the idea that nefarious actors were intentionally trying to bring immigrants to the United States to shift the country’s demography — a subject of national conversation. The idea quickly gained traction with Republican voters and, by extension, with Republican officials eager to appeal to that base. It wasn’t usually “the Jews won’t replace us” — just that “they” wouldn’t, in some form or another.
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Then the issue of immigration became more salient. After a pandemic-related lull in 2020, Trump lost reelection. Joe Biden became president. The number of people seeking to come to the United States soared, though the numbers are often exaggerated (including by Trump). Fox News began covering immigration breathlessly. The channel has already mentioned immigration, immigrants or the border 6 percent more often than it did during the entirety of Trump’s time in office; after mentioning immigration less than CNN and MSNBC under Trump, it has mentioned it 75 percent more often than its two competitors combined since Biden became president in 2021.
Just as he did at the outset of his 2016 campaign, Trump quickly leaned into anti-immigrant rhetoric as his 2024 bid began to gear up. But now that rhetoric has shifted dramatically to the right. His 2015 disparagements of criminal immigrants coming into the country have become entirely unabashed. His extreme White-House-era claims offered in support of building a wall, like the threat of terrorist incursions, have become background noise. He’d occasionally described immigrants in dehumanizing terms as president; he seemingly has no qualms about doing so regularly now.
This is what’s important. It’s not that Trump is saying things Hitler did, though he is. It’s that he is doing so as someone who has promised his heavily White base “retribution” and who has made obvious his intent to step outside the bounds of presidential power when he can. He’s using this rhetoric as he and his aides reportedly discuss how to deploy the military against immigrants, including building internment camps. He’s again reflecting the verbiage of the fringe, but that verbiage has shifted well to the right over the past eight years.
Trump fought tooth and nail to constrain and demonize immigrants as president but hit walls both internally and externally. Now he knows how to get around the internal barriers more easily, and the external debate is now unfolding on much friendlier, more extreme terrain.
It’s that, not simply the comparisons to Hitler’s rhetoric, that’s worrisome.
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