If Donald Trump wins, the people who voted for him would have a range of reasons for putting him in office. There are a lot of potential Trump voters who don’t like him that much or who really like only parts of his personality or platform and tolerate the rest.
There are probably also those who have their own understanding of what they’re getting, possibly rooted in the way they felt about the Trump administration or feel about the Biden one. Some of this could be summarized by how Brian Kemp, the Georgia governor, pitched it recently: “Look, you may not like Donald Trump personally, but you’ll like his policies a lot better than Kamala Harris’s. It’s a business decision.”
But how Trump understands that decision could be different. If he wins like this, how it’s been, how grim he’s taken things across the last two years but especially lately, his explanation for the victory — and the consequences of that reasoning — might be different and darker than even many of the people who voted for him wanted.
The way he’s talked about towns like Springfield, Ohio, and the Haitians who officials have said are there legally to work resembles deeply the rhythms of the 2016 campaign: grim conflation of real and fake problems, real people caught up in the gears of awful scrutiny and abuse, the building pressure on politicians and people often in very normal and modest circumstances and Trump weaving everything into a fable to prove that he was right.
In his campaign speeches, intermixed with the jokes and riffs, Trump often talks about political retribution, the threat of World War III, the ruin that the country’s become. In just one speech, he talked about how he would “liberate” Wisconsin from an “invasion of murderers, rapists, hoodlums, drug dealers, thugs and vicious gang members,” and about how immigrant gangs had “occupied” “hundreds” of towns and cities across the Midwest, leaving law enforcement “petrified.”
Trump seems to have twisted the reason that programs like Temporary Protected Status and humanitarian parole exist — for instance, Haiti has been deemed too unstable and dangerous to return to — into a reason for the programs not to exist. “So we have travel warnings,” he said. “‘Don’t go here, don’t go there, don’t go to the various countries’ and yet she’s taking in the worst of those people, the killers, the jailbirds, all of the worst of the people, she’s taking them in.”
At various points, he escalated the migrant situation into cultural, civilizational terms that can’t be easily fixed, unlike the economy. “Nothing can be as serious as this — because this gets down to the very fabric of our society,” he said. “Your way of life.”
But, as he has noted a few times recently, deep into the Wisconsin speech he said: “You know, I won in 2016 on the border. It was one of the big things. I mean, I won for a lot of reasons.”
That’s one of the common interpretations of his 2016 victory, and clearly he thinks he could win on the border again. And yet: There will be no real way to know. It’s almost inarguable that his immigration positions helped him secure the Republican nomination in a divided field at a time when restrictive immigration politics had been dominating the conservative movement since the early 2010s. But back then, not as many Republican politicians shared his approach — it was still an active debate within the party.
It’s difficult to know why exactly he won and Hillary Clinton lost all those years ago. The 2016 election was close — a few hundred thousand votes in a handful of states ultimately separated a win from a loss — and that could have been about the border or more about Clinton and the things she did or didn’t do than about Trump or the idea of him as a businessman in the long aftermath of the Great Recession or people wanting change or a hundred other things. There’s no real way of telling objectively and conclusively what one reason it was. And it’s not as if we can run the experiment twice to know for sure.
But if you win the presidency by 0.4 percent and two electoral votes, you win everything. Winning a presidential race can become a force that reshapes politics itself, and in particular, with Trump’s charismatic, endlessly demanding presence, his previous victory has shaped policy and politics for the past eight years, in and out of office, particularly around his hardened, transactional view of people and power.
There’s a tendency to point out what Trump did not do in office, like finish the wall. But during his tenure, to give one example, refugee admissions dropped to the lowest number in decades. It’s incredibly difficult to enter the United States through the refugee program; an applicant must clear screenings and meet a number of criteria. This, theoretically, is the kind of program that a security-minded person would support, in the realm of other parts of the legal immigration system Trump sometimes promises. The refugee program is also, certainly, in keeping with the idea of America as a place that is open to those who have suffered. Trump had opposed the prospect of refugees from Syria in 2015.
The New York Times
