During a campaign event in Arizona, Donald Trump once again echoed nativist tropes while talking about migrants to the U.S., the latest in a long string of rhetoric about immigrants and political opponents that’s been compared to fascist dictators.
The comments came as the former president claimed before a crowd in Tempe that Kamala Harris “deliberately dismantled our border and threw open the gates.”
“We’re a dumping ground. We’re like a garbage can for the world,” Trump continued. “That’s what’s happened. We’re like a garbage can. You know it’s the first time I’ve ever said that. Every time I come up and talk about what they’ve done to our country, I get angrier, and it’s the first time I’ve ever said ‘garbage can,’ but it’s a very accurate description.”
Denigrating the U.S. or claiming the country is past its prime has long been part of Trump’s stump speech — his slogan is Make America Great Again, after all — and that has continued during this campaign, with the Republican calling America a “nation in decline” and a “third-world hellhole” run by “perverts” and “thugs.”
The former president has reserved particular venom for immigrants, however.
During the 2024 race, he has described immigration to the U.S. as “an invasion of our country” leading the “plunder, rape, and slaughter of our American suburbs and cities,” even though there’s no documented relationship between increased migration and crime, and studies suggest immigrants are actually less likely than those born in the US to break the law.
Trump has claimed that immigrants are bringing disease and “destroying the blood of our country” and vowed to deport millions of people in a mass expulsion event he suggested will be a “bloody story.” He’s falsely linked migrants to fentanyl coming into the US, even though the majority of those caught with and prosecuted for trafficking fentanyl across the border are US citizens.
Both he and his running mate, Senator JD Vance, helped spread a baseless conspiracy theory that Haitian immigrants in Ohio were eating neighborhood pets, a stance that was praised by local neo-Nazis but disavowed by local officials, who said there was no evidence behind the claims.
Trump’s wider politics — which often combine dehumanizing insults towards his enemies, threats of using military force on critics, and attacks on non-white immigrants — match the definition of fascism, his former chief of staff John Kelly claimed recently, amid a wider controversy that Trump reportedly praised Hitler and his generals while in the White House. The former president denies praising Hitler and has said Kelly is lying.
Despite the difference in tone, the Harris campaign has touted the vice president’s support for a scuttled bipartisan border bill that matched many Republican priorities on immigration, including surging agents to the border and restricting access to the legally protected right to claim asylum.
According to a recent poll for The Independent, most Hispanic voters believe there is a border crisis, and the Harris campaign has a substantial advantage with this constituency.
