Donald Trump branded Joe Biden’s recent asylum executive order “bull****” during an Arizona campaign rally as he returned to the fiercely anti-immigrant rhetoric that defined his 2016 campaign.
The former president said he didn’t want to use the swear word in front of the children in the crowd on Thursday, but the audience took the hint and began to chant “bulls***!” over and over again.
Elsewhere, Trump described the border as a “dumping ground for the dungeons of the Third World.”
The town hall in Phoenix marked the first time the former president has hit the campaign trail for a major event since his recent conviction in his hush money trial in New York.
Trump painted the Biden immigration executive order, which allows the president to temporarily shut down the legal US asylum process if illegal entries cross a certain threshold, as insufficient, calling it a “nightmare” and the “Biden border invasion.”
“He’s totally lost control over the border and it’s a really dangerous,” Trump said, adding, “He’s conceding death and he’s conceding defeat at the border.”
During his speech, Trump echoed the ideas of the Great Replacement theory, a racist conspiracy that posits elites are encouraging immigration to undermine the power of white Americans.
“It’s a deliberate demolition of our sovereignty and our borders,” he said. “I guess it’s probably votes. They probably think these people are going to be voting.”
“He wants to turn every single illegal alien into a voting citizen,” Trump later said of Biden.
While Trump touched on other issues like inflation and the presidential debates, immigration was the main focus of his speech, a clear appeal to the concerns of the border state of Arizona.
At one point, Trump pulled former Maricopa County sheriff Joe Arpaio onstage. Arpaio, who often branded himself “America’s toughest sheriff,” was known for hard-line tactics like using chain gangs, and was the subject of numerous civil rights lawsuits alleging he profiled Latinos and migrants. In 2016, he was found guilty of criminal contempt for ignoring a court order in a racial-profiling case, though he was later pardoned by Trump.
“I don’t kiss men, but I kiss him,” Trump said as the former official came onstage and briefly took the microphone, joking that he wanted to see Donald Trump’s birth certificate.
Both men helped fuel the racist “birther” conspiracy questioning whether Barack Obama was really an American citizen.
Elsewhere during the event, Trump slammed the hush money decision, potentially violating an ongoing gag order that prevents him from commenting about witnesses, jurors, and others tied to the criminal case.
“I just went through a rigged trial in New York with a highly conflicted, and I mean highly conflicted, judge, where there was no crime,” he said. “It was made up, fabricated stuff.”
During a question-and-answer portion of the event, Trump continued to talk about immigration, suggesting he would heavily tariff the countries where migrants to the US originated. “We are going to be so tough and if a country is not going to behave, we’re going to tariff the hell out that country,” he said. “If we have to we’ll do more than that. I don’t think you’re going to need it.”
Later, in response to a question about the economy, Trump compared the US to Germany’s hyper-inflation after WWI, seen as an important precursor to the rise of Nazism in the country.
“It busted up Germany years and years ago,” he said. “Any time that you have inflation that’s not checked, that’s not controlled, it busts up countries because it’s a country buster.”
The former president also bashed climate policies, calling the Green New Deal a “green new scam,” even as nearly a dozen of his supporters were hospitalized because of extreme heat waiting to get into the event.
The climate crisis is exacerbating the risk of extreme heat deaths in states like Arizona.
