Donald Trump and his running mate, Sen. JD Vance, have found a new favorite racist hoax in the form of Haitian immigrants purportedly stealing and eating pets in Ohio. But that baseless lie—and another about Venezuelan gangs supposedly taking control of U.S. cities—is only the latest in a long history of the Republican Party’s immigration hysteria.
The hysteria stems from how the policy-bankrupt GOP needs to charge up its base before an election. And while white supremacist and xenophobic messaging has long been a staple of the GOP, it hit a new pitch after Trump took an escalator down to announce his plans to run for president in 2015.
During that campaign, Trump called Mexican immigrants drug dealers and rapists. His bluntness was characterized as uncouth, but the overt racism of his rhetoric seemed to simply be a peeling away of the more diplomatic language of “anti-amnesty, enforcement-first” used by past Republican leaders.
Also in 2015, Trump promised to build a wall and have Mexico pay for it. That didn’t happen. In fact, MAGA celebrities like former Trump adviser Steve Bannon were charged with defrauding people while fundraising to build a border wall.
Then came the 2018 election cycle and the “migrant caravan.” Right-wing operatives and media manufactured a cacophony of alarming threats about an amorphous horde of immigrants traveling through South America on their way to the U.S.-Mexico border.
But after Election Day, talk of the caravan vanished. And the suffering at the border and throughout our country continued unabated due to the Trump administration’s terrible policies. But the acute threat—that a mass of criminals and psychopaths, including secret MS-13 gangs and ISIS agents—would come crashing through the gates evaporated almost overnight.
During the runup to the 2020 presidential election between Trump and Joe Biden, the right leaned into a general anti-immigration push in battleground states. If it seemed less focused, that might have been due to COVID-19 pandemic that the Trump administration was mismanaging. Clearly, the racist hysteria didn’t work for Republica that year. Trump was beaten soundly by Biden.
That brings us to today. The new plan of attacking Haitian and Latino immigrants differs from previous iterations only in that the lies are more shamelessly sensational. Whether that is the result of veteran MAGA advisers like Stephen Miller, or of newer and equally unhinged sycophants like Laura Loomer, is probably a chicken-or-the-egg conundrum. But it does reveal a certain sweaty desperation on the part of Republicans, who might feel their polling lead on immigration is either in jeopardy or simply the only ghost story they have left to frighten Americans into voting for them.
