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The stories that matter on money and politics in the race for the White House
It has been raining cats and dogs in America. The myth that immigrants are eating pets in Springfield, Ohio has triggered an outpouring of memes. An early example showed Donald Trump hugging a kitten and a goose. These were soon swamped by plays on the absurdity of the claims. The silver lining to this postmodern version of blood libel is that humour remains an effective tool.
Beneath it, though, lies a momentous twist in American politics. Trump launched his 2016 campaign with an attack on illegal immigration. He has gradually expanded that to include legal migrants who come from the wrong culture. Refugees from Haiti, which Trump once called a “shithole”, are a soft target. Though most of the 20,000 or so Haitians in Springfield are in the US legally, they have arrived in short order.
It is easy to suppose that Trump will lose votes for indulging this pet-eating chimera. But his dark rhetoric masks a calculated bet. Trump’s first campaign was based on federal incompetence: the US, he said, should uphold the rule of law by policing its southern border. His revised case is that US lore must be defended from outsiders. American culture needs protecting from unwanted strangers, even if they are legal.
This shift is exemplified by the political odyssey of JD Vance, Trump’s running mate. In his acceptance speech nine weeks ago, Vance said the true US nation could be found in the seven generations of family burials in Kentucky cemeteries. Their America was not so much an idea as a place for which his ancestors had fought and died. “People will not fight for abstractions, but they will fight for a home,” Vance said.
The striking fact of Vance’s speech was not his awkwardly-phrased passage about the immigrant background of his wife, Usha Vance (born Chilukuri). Two of Trump’s wives, after all, have been immigrants. Nor was it his avoidance of American exceptionalism, which Trump has previously depicted as a lie. It was the degree to which Vance inverted what he said about his roots in his 2016 bestseller, Hillbilly Elegy.
Then, Vance thought that the people with whom he was raised were culpable for their own plight of relying on handouts and food stamps.
“We purchase homes we don’t need, refinance them for more spending money, and declare bankruptcy, often leaving them full of garbage in our wake” he wrote. “Thrift is inimical to our being.”
Eight years later, he now claims that the same people are victims of outside forces, as opposed to what he once called their own “learned helplessness”. He has swapped a self-questioning brand of libertarianism for straight-up ethno-nationalism. Each is a coherent but opposite worldview. Vance’s switch is driven by the fact that Trump subscribes to the nativist one. There are plenty more votes in describing Americans as victims than as culprits. Vance’s road-to-Damascus personifies what has happened to the Republican Party in the last eight years.
But will it help them regain the White House? Trump and especially Vance have earned a lot of scorn in the last 10 days for spreading a tale that they know to be a lie. Vance has even defended the pet disinformation story as useful fiction because it reveals a deeper truth. Many of his Ohio constituents believe the story even if it is not technically accurate, he says. Trump once called this “truthful hyperbole”. If it sounds plausible you should go with it.
Democrats will find it hard to see past their outrage about the bomb threats that have closed schools in Springfield in the last week. Mike DeWine, Ohio’s governor, an old-style Republican, is even sending in the national guard to keep its schools open. That should not blind Democrats to the fact that Trump and Vance are following a calculated line. The more America thinks about immigration, which serves Trump, the less it focuses on abortion, which serves Kamala Harris. Those who say that Trump has gone too far are often the people who made that same claim in 2016. It is not a given.
Polls say that most Americans remain open to immigration. But they want the inflows to be controlled and legal. This is roughly midway between where voters see the Democrats and Republicans. The issue remains a weak point for Harris. In that regard, she did almost too well against Trump in their debate last week. Harris distracted him with such skill that he failed to debate her role as “border tsar” under Joe Biden. She will need to tackle that head on.
Trump and Vance are playing roulette with real human beings. But elections are not morality contests. Their cynicism over the stolen pet myth may not be as self-harming as it looks.
edward.luce@ft.com
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