The message from the second night of the Republican National Convention was clear — and brutal: Elect Donald Trump this November or the United States will be overrun with brown people and drugs that will kill you, your family, and everyone you care about.
The GOP trotted out an array of lawmakers throughout the night’s programming, dubbed “Make America Safe Again,” to deliver their well-worn lines about migrant crime and the need to build a border wall, but the gist of the evening was best captured in an interstitial video rife with garish imagery — including stock footage of a cadaver in a morgue, a family crying at a funeral, and, for some reason, a nuclear bomb exploding.
“This is the man responsible for your family’s safety,” the video began, showing a string of unflattering clips of President Joe Biden. “And he’s failed you — terribly.”
The video keyed on comments Biden made during a 2020 Democratic primary debate about how the United States is ready and willing to accept migrants seeking asylum. Clips of crowds of migrants played as an ominous narrator warned of drug gangs, sex traffickers, and ISIS terrorists. It’s all “putting America on high alert for an attack and your family at great risk” — and it’s all the “weak” and “incompetent” Biden’s fault.
As the crowd watched the video and listened to the series of Republican speakers dishing out lurid, horrifying details, many of the assembled delegates, audience members, and conservative luminaries whooped, hissed, chanted, and at times fist-pumped. Everyone appeared conditioned and desensitized to the tales of terror, having heard versions of these tales of out-of-control bloodletting numerous times before on Fox News and elsewhere. Meanwhile, attendees waved signs that read “STOP BIDEN’S BORDER BLOODBATH.”
Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Texas) seemed inspired during his speech to the convention, which immediately followed the video. “Americans are dying,” he said. “Murdered, assaulted, raped by illegal immigrants that the Democrats have released.”
Cruz highlighted the deaths of Laken Riley, Rachel Morin, and Kate Steinle — whose stories are fixtures in right-wing fear-mongering about migrant crime — asserting they “happened because Democrats cynically decided they wanted votes from illegals more than they wanted to protect our children.”
Studies have shown that immigrants are significantly less likely to commit crime than Americans born in the U.S., including in Cruz’s home state of Texas.
Most of the night’s speakers referenced the border. House Speaker Mike Johnson (R-La.) said we “cannot allow the many millions of illegal aliens they’ve allowed across our borders to harm our citizens, drain our resources, or disrupt our elections,” nodding to the Great Replacement conspiracy theory that Democrats are deliberately trying to flood the nation with immigrants to win elections. So did Johnson’s fellow Louisianan lawmaker Rep. Steve Scalise (R-La.). “Biden and Harris want illegals to vote now that they’ve opened up the border,” he said.
Rep. Elise Stefanik (R-N.Y.) lamented Biden’s “wide-open border” and the “sanctuary cities” in her state. Sen. Tim Scott (R-Fla.), who wants to be the next Senate majority leader, joked about how in his “nightmare,” Biden erased the border and “flew in so many illegals into our country that Mexican cartels started getting frequent flyer miles.” Sen. Tom Cotton (R-Ark.) spoke of a “third-world invasion” and detailed his own real-life nightmare of a flight he was on being “full of these migrants.”
It wasn’t just lawmakers, either. Michael Coyle, who runs an Instagram page that chronicles drug use in Philadelphia, spoke about the opioid epidemic in the city. “Joe Biden and Kamala Harris are the ones who opened our southern border and allowed Chinese fentanyl to pour in unconditionally,” he said, before describing how some “tranq” addicts “smell of rotting flesh,” and how Trump “will end the urban nightmare.”
Republicans projected migrant-fueled doom and gloom all night, but they also looked ahead to what will happen to them should Trump win another term in November. “We’ll start by securing the border. If you came here illegally under Joe Biden you’re going back to where you came from under Donald Trump,” said Rep. Jim Banks (R-Ind.). Vivek Ramaswamy, Trump’s primary opponent turned lapdog, said that electing Trump is the only way to “seal” the border and “restore law and order in this country.”
Somehow, Trump’s plan to crack down on immigration is even more terrifying than the Republicans who spoke on Tuesday night let on. He wants to round up undocumented migrants across America and toss them in detention camps until they can be kicked out of the country. He’ll do away with due-process hearings to make it easier to do so, and will even contract the military to help with the eradication effort. He told Newsmax earlier this year that he’ll also give local law enforcement “immunity” to crack down on migrants however they see fit.
Trump has also spoken in far more denigrating terms about undocumented immigrants than most of his minions would dare. He has echoed Adolf Hitler by saying migrants are “poisoning the blood of our country,” describing them throughout the campaign as violent criminals — just as he did in the summer of 2015 when he appalled America by kicking off his first presidential campaign by saying Mexico was sending “rapists” across the border.
Tuesday night at the Republican National Convention was yet more proof of what has long been obvious: that Republicans have not only embraced Trump’s disgusting rhetoric about immigrants over the past decade, they want it to define the party.
The grisly programming of the convention’s second night was perfectly in line with Trump’s B-movie-grade, gory vision of what “law and order” should look like in modern America.
“In conversations I’d been in the room for, President Trump would explicitly say that he’d love a country that was totally an ‘eye for an eye’ — that’s a direct quote — criminal-justice system, and he’d talk about how the ‘right’ way to do it is to line up criminals and drug dealers before a firing squad,” a former Trump White House official previously told Rolling Stone.
“You just got to kill these people,” Trump would often say while in the White House, this ex-official recounted.
“He had a particular affinity for the firing squad, because it seemed more dramatic, rather than how we do it, putting a syringe in people and putting them to sleep,” the former official said. “He was big on the idea of executing large numbers of drug dealers and drug lords because he’d say, ‘These people don’t care about anything,’ and that they run their drug empire and their deals from prison anyways, and then they get back out on the street, get all their money again, and keep committing crimes … and therefore, they need to be eradicated, not jailed.”
