As Trump slides in polls, his attacks on immigrants become increasingly delusional

Andres Oppenheimer

It’s unclear whether Democratic candidate Kamala Harris’ current rise in the polls will last until the November elections, but one thing is obvious: her Republican rival, former president Donald Trump, is on the defensive, and showing signs of growing desperation.

A Morning Consult poll of 11,501 registered voters nationwide released Aug. 20 shows Harris winning by 4%, while a FiveThirtyEight average of national polls has her ahead by 2.8%. Most polls also show Harris either leading or in a statistical tie in key swing states.

As Trump slides in the polls, he is increasingly focusing his campaign on demonizing immigrants, much more than talking about the economy, or any other issue. That’s dangerous, because his fake data about immigration, amplified by Fox News and other right-wing media, may foster more racial discrimination and hate crimes.

It’s no coincidence that on Thursday, the day of Harris’ nomination acceptance speech at the Democratic National Convention, Trump chose to try to steal some of the limelight from her by going to the U.S. border with Mexico in Arizona.

In his speech there, flanked by relatives of people reportedly killed by undocumented migrants, he repeated his false claims that there is a “deadly plague of migrant crime” that allegedly amounts to a “nation-wrecking invasion.” Such claims are in open contradiction with official data and virtually all serious studies.

Trump has recently been making increasingly outlandish claims about undocumented immigrants, calling them “animals,” “savage monsters,” and saying they are “poisoning the blood of our country,” a language akin to that used by Adolf Hitler in Nazi Germany.

President Biden countered Trump’s claims by stating in his DNC speech that “border encounters have dropped over 50%” as a result of an executive order he signed earlier this year. As for Trump’s narrative that migrants are causing a “deadly plague” of homicides, Biden said that violent crimes in the United States are at their lowest level in more than 50 years.

The respected fact-checking site Politifact has rated both of Biden’s statements mostly accurate. The flow of undocumented migrants reached a record high in 2023, but plummeted in 2024. A study by Stanford University’s Institute for Economic Policy Research last year found that immigrants are 30% less likely to be jailed than U.S.-born Americans.

But I fear that Trump’s hate speech against immigrants will further escalate in coming weeks, in part because many of his other campaign rallying points are falling flat.

Trump’s claim that the U.S. economy is in shambles sounds increasingly odd at a time when the Wall Street stock market has reached a record high, inflation is coming down, and the United States is the fastest growing economy among major industrialized nations.

The Trump campaign and Republican groups have already spent $247 million in the first six months of this year on television and digital ads focused on illegal migration, according to AdImpact, a firm that monitors political advertising. That’s more than Republicans spent on ads about any other issue, including the economy.

Interestingly, more than 80% of these ads never aired in states that border Mexico, The Washington Post reported. Most of these ads ran in Ohio, Indiana and Montana, which have relatively small immigrant populations. Perhaps those who aired these ads know that people in border states would consider their content bizarre.

In a change of strategy, the Democrats have in recent days decided that it will be more effective for them to portray themselves as tough on migration than trying to debunk Trump’s lies about an alleged wave of “migrant crime.”

In her DNC speech, Harris presented herself as a former prosecutor who fought against foreign criminals, and blamed Trump for killing a bipartisan bill in Congress that contained strong measures to protect the border.

“Trump believes a border deal would hurt his campaign, so he ordered his allies in Congress to kill the deal,” she said.

The Democrats have probably concluded that, with 77% of Americans saying in a Pew Research poll that the border situation is a “crisis” or a “major problem,” there’s no time left before the elections to convince voters that Trump is peddling falsehoods about migrants.

While the Democrats’ strategy may be politically expedient, tacitly accepting Trump’s immigration lies comes with a cost: It will help normalize the former president’s claims that undocumented migrants are “criminals,” “animals,” and “savage monsters,” rather than hard-working people who pay taxes and do jobs that most Americans don’t want to do.

That will only help increase racial discrimination and hatred not just against undocumented migrants, but against all immigrants. It’s going to get increasingly ugly.