Reprinted with permission from Shareblue.com
According to senior adviser Stephen Miller, the Trump White House has settled on a campaign stoking racism as a desperate ploy to keep Republicans in control of Congress.
Miller made that admission in an interview with Breitbart, the white supremacist website known for highlighting “black crime.” Miller, among the most loyal of Trump’s underlings, once infamously announced that Trump’s power “will not be questioned” and attacked the pro-immigrant message etched on the Statue of Liberty.
Miller explained to Breitbart that lacking any strong, positive message going into the midterm elections, Republicans plan to use the criminal gang MS-13 as a boogeyman to scare up votes.
“The big fight this summer is going to be with the open borders Democratic caucus in Congress,” Miller said, using a lie that Republicans have often used to attack Democrats. There is no such thing as an “open borders” faction in Congress; Republicans like Miller simply use the inflammatory term to attack those who are pro-immigrant.
“The Democratic party is at grave risk of completely marginalizing itself from the American voters by continuing to lean into its absolutist anti-enforcement positions,” Miller added.
The Trump administration has been flustered because Democrats have refused to fully fund his unworkable border wall and have pushed back against the assault on Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA). The DACA policy was put into place by President Barack Obama to give those who were brought to America as children the ability to live and work without fear of deportation.
Trump has attacked the provisions, putting the lives of thousands of innocent people and their families in jeopardy and terror. He has walked away from negotiations with Democrats to fix DACA, even though repairing the program is one of the top election issues for voters.
Demonstrating the GOP’s dedication to racist language, Miller defended Trump calling immigrants animals, echoing Trump’s claim, which is debunked by video, that he was merely referring to MS-13.
Twisting reality, Miller alleged, “You saw members of the Democratic Party and the media leaping to the defense of the gang that is engaged in the most vile, dehumanizing, and egregious actions.”
In fact, Democrats were condemning Trump for once again attacking immigrants, something he has done since he launched his campaign by calling Mexicans rapists and pushing for a ban on Muslim travel to the United States.
Inside the White House, at Miller’s side, Trump has been indulging in his own racism.
Huddling with Miller and his son-in-law Jared Kushner, the Washington Post reports, “Trump reminded them the crowds loved his rhetoric on immigrants along the campaign trail.”
And he actually performed such repugnant behavior right then and there. “Acting as if he were at a rally, he then read aloud a few made-up Hispanic names and described potential crimes they could have committed, such as rape or murder,” the Post reports. When Trump approvingly pointed out that his supporters enjoyed when he talked about throwing Latino immigrants out of the country, the Post adds, Miller and Kushner “laughed.”
The White House disinformation campaign echoes the desperate message used by Virginia gubernatorial candidate Ed Gillespie. Endorsed by Trump, the Gillespie campaign ran numerous ads about MS-13, attacking Democrat Ralph Northam for supposedly being soft on immigration.
Voters rejected the racist message, 53.9 percent to 45 percent.
But it might be all Republicans have left. Their hopes of running based on the billionaire tax cut package have expired. It hasn’t worked, again and again. Voters are simply not buying the message that tax cuts for the extremely wealthy and megacorporations can do anything to help them.
It has been a tradition with Republican campaigns to make an appeal to bigotry when everything else isn’t working. The party has often successfully deployed fear of an “other” as a pathway to electoral success.
Now Stephen Miller, representing the White House and speaking to a white supremacist website, revealed that the gutter path will once again be the party’s chosen route to hold on to its power.
But so far, voters have rejected that decision, and they are poised to do so once again.
