Former President Donald Trump’s performance during the September 10th, 2024 Presidential debate against Vice President Kamala Harris, reinforced what we already knew about him. But it also exemplified how he continues to use racist rhetoric in his Presidential campaign. And this isn’t the first time. He did, after all, announce his first candidacy by saying Mexicans coming into the United States were “Bringing crime. They’re rapists. And some, I assume, are good people.” Not content with that, he ran not just on the promise of building a wall between the United States and Mexico, but on the assurance that Mexico would pay for it. That, of course, did not happen.
During the debate, he suggested a win by Vice President Harris would turn America into “Venezuela on steroids,” without any real context on what that would mean – and seemingly any real knowledge of the situation in Venezuela right now, much less in the last two decades – made another weird reference to Black and Hispanic jobs, brought up the Central Park Five out of nowhere, and repeated right-wing propaganda suggesting Haitian immigrants were responsible for eating people’s pets in Springfield, Ohio.
All of these are not just very strange talking points for a man running for President of the United States, let me be clear, though they are that. But they are, most importantly, proof of Trump’s racism. The same racism he displayed the first time he ran for President and the same racism he let dictate policy when he was President of the United States.
“In Springfield, they’re eating the dogs. The people that came in, they’re eating the cats. They’re eating the pets of the people that live there. And this is what’s happening in our country. And it’s a shame,” Trump said during the debate, a claim so absurd even the moderator pushed back on it. And yet Trump has never been concerned about facts when it comes to painting immigrants, Black people, and the Latine community as the problem.
That’s why he brought up the Central Park Five as well during the debate and defended his decision to call for the death penalty for five innocent men in a full-page ad in four of New York City’s newspapers, including the New York Times. And that’s why in his recounting of their story, the woman at the center of the story didn’t survive the attack. Except she isn’t dead. Trisha Meili is still alive, and a successful author and motivational speaker. To Trump’s racist storyline, however, she doesn’t matter. Only the evil perpetrators he has built up in this specific narrative do. And those are never white.
Of course, Trump said many more problematic things, including but not limited to his insistence that women are somehow aborting during the ninth month of pregnancy, his apparent belief that people who are taking asylum are coming from insane asylums, and his admission that he has no plans for governance, only “concepts of a plan.” Racism isn’t his only problem. But it is at the root of a lot of what is wrong with his campaign and the people that surround him.
Former President Donald Trump thinks only the people who look like him and have had the same privileges he had should have rights. For the rest, he has a very specific place for them. Because it’s not that he doesn’t want those people to exist, no. Afterall, there are Black and Hispanic jobs he needs us to fill. But he’ll continue to demonize these communities if it means stirring up his fanbase to win the upcoming Presidential election with rampant racist conspiracies and damaging rhetoric on who immigrants and people of color are.
