Vice President JD Vance defended the GOP’s government shutdown on Wednesday by falsely claiming the Democratic Party is trying to give federal health care benefits to undocumented immigrants.
"If you're an American citizen [and] you've been to a hospital in the last few years, you probably noticed that wait times are especially large, and very often somebody who's there in the emergency room waiting is an illegal alien—very often a person who can't even speak English,” Vance said. “Why do those people get health care benefits at hospitals paid for by American citizens?”
As ABC News notes, undocumented immigrants are not eligible for federally funded health insurance programs.
Like many of his GOP colleagues, Vance’s only defense for the party’s failed policies is racist scapegoating. While the Trump administration threatens Americans with economic suffering, their supposed solutions amount to little more than blaming immigrants and marginalized groups for the consequences of their own policies.
The Republican playbook is simple: Lie, repeat the lie, and lie again.
Donald Trump’s campaign is desperately trying to clean up his latest mess after he bombed Wednesday while speaking to the National Association of Black Journalists on Wednesday.
In a racist tirade, Trump accused Vice President Kamala Harris of playing cynical games with her heritage.
“She was Indian all the way,” he said, “then all of a sudden she made a turn and she went—she became a Black person.”
The campaign knew it was a disaster before it was even over. What was supposed to be an hour-long question-and-answer session was abruptly cut short by Trump’s campaign after just 34 minutes—“an indication of how much of a train wreck it was for him,” tweeted Axios reporter Sophia Cai, “and also how good the questioning was.”
Trump came out of the event on defense.
“The questions were Rude and Nasty, often in the form of a statement, but we CRUSHED IT!” he posted on social media.
The campaign immediately started spinning, issuing a statement blasting “Liberal Mainstream Media Malpractice” and the “unhinged and unprofessional” journalists and their “biased and rude treatment from certain hostile members of the media” acting out their “fake outrage.”
Trump’s running mate, Sen. J.D. Vance (R-OH), tried to spin the disaster by painting Trump as valiant.
“President Trump walked right into the NABJ conference and showed he had the courage to take tough questions, while Kamala Harris continues to hide from any scrutiny or unfriendly media like the coward she is,” he tweeted.
The only courage on display during those 34 minutes came from ABC’s Rachel Scott, who moderated the event.
The Harris campaign responded quickly with a statement as well.
“The hostility Donald Trump showed on stage today is the same hostility he has shown throughout his life, throughout his term in office, and throughout his campaign,” communications director Michael Tyler said.
"Trump lobbed personal attacks and insults at Black journalists the same way he did throughout his presidency—while he failed Black families and left the entire country digging out of the ditch he left us in,” he continued. “Donald Trump has already proven he cannot unite America, so he attempts to divide us.”
The blatant racism on display was shocking but not surprising to anyone who’s watched Trump’s political career. He rode to political prominence in 2011 by leading the “birther” conspiracy against then-President Barack Obama, and he rode down that golden escalator in 2015 to announce his first presidential campaign with a vicious attack on Mexicans.
This is who he is. His campaign can’t control him, they can’t fight 78 years worth of poison in him. That’s on full display in the 11-minute supercut compiled by journalist Aaron Rupar:
That Trump could lose to a woman who is both Black and South Asian might just break him.
Jeff Danziger lives in New York City and Vermont. He is a long time cartoonist for The Rutland Herald and is represented by Counterpoint Syndicate. He is a recipient of the Herblock Prize and the Thomas Nast (Landau) Prize. He served in the US Army in Vietnam and was awarded the Bronze Star and the Air Medal. He has published eleven books of cartoons, a novel and a memoir. Visit him at DanzigerCartoons.
Should Donald Trump win the presidency in November, he will probably owe his victory to Black and Hispanic voters. If that prediction startles you, then perhaps you haven't been reading the most recent polls. Trump is maintaining a small but persistent lead over President Joe Biden in national averages — and the apparent reason is that those minority voters, who voted overwhelmingly Democratic in 2020, show much less enthusiasm for Biden in this election.
Waning support for the incumbent among his own partisan base appears to cross racial, generational and geographic lines, with many asking whether he should have stepped aside by now. Others blame him for inflation, although prices spiked across the developed world after the pandemic. But the dramatic decline in Black support for Biden is deeply puzzling — especially when the only alternative is returning Trump to power.
Exactly how Biden has disappointed those voters remains mysterious, given his own political history and behavior. He was the loyal vice president of America's first Black president and chose a Black woman as his running mate. He has named many Black appointees to top positions in government, including Supreme Court Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson. Other than Barack Obama, he is the most outspoken opponent of white supremacy ever to occupy the Oval Office.None of that appears to have made any impression on a substantial segment of Black voters, however, especially among the youngest — whose alienation is now growing because of Biden's support for Israel in Gaza. (One wonders what they, or anyone planning to abandon the Democrats over that conflict, believe Trump would have done or will do in such circumstances.)
But let's ask the question a different way and forget about Biden for a moment. What would happen to Black America — and other minorities in this country — if Trump regains power in 2025?
Begin by glancing back to the time when Trump entered presidential politics, even before he came down the escalator in his gilded tower to slander Mexicans as rapists and murderers. He first signaled those ambitions with his conspiratorial campaign claiming that Obama was not a native-born citizen, and therefore ineligible to be president, but a secret immigrant from Kenya. It was a big lie, the precursor of many more to come, culminating in the very Big Lie that the 2020 election had been "rigged" against him. And it was a racist falsehood, calculated to evoke the ugliest kind of hostility among the Tea Party Republicans who later swarmed into Trump's MAGA cult.
The future that a Trump presidency would portend is bleak indeed for a diverse and multicultural democracy whose citizens hope to move forward together, not backward in division. Turning Point USA, the MAGA "youth wing," will mark Martin Luther King Jr.'s birthday this month with an expensive campaign to demonize him and to persuade Americans that the landmark civil rights legislation he helped to win was "a huge mistake," according to its leader Charlie Kirk.
Kirk has used his organization and his close connection with Trump to enrich himself and his cronies, but that is hardly the worst of his offenses. His forthcoming crusade to roll back civil rights will be overseen by someone named Blake Neff, a Turning Point staffer who once worked on Tucker Carlson's Fox News show — until the exposure of his voluminous racist and misogynist online messaging. Try to imagine how bad those had to be for a Fox executive who described them as "abhorrent" when the network announced Neff's dismissal.That the Trump movement would aspire to repeal the Civil Rights Act, after everything their leader has done to undermine the rights of minorities and women, shouldn't surprise anyone who has been paying attention. "Make America Great Again" always carried a dubious undertone, loudly hinting this county was better when we lived under the stale hierarchies of a bygone century.
Come November there will be only one effective way to reject that mentality and its implications for us and our children. No American of good will, regardless of race, creed or color, should harbor any illusions otherwise.
