Anyone trying to understand the dynamics of American politics since Donald Trump entered the arena as a presidential candidate in 2015 has had to deal with the numbing effect of this man and his movement’s endless breaches of decorum and precedent. So it’s not easy to single out any one expression of the MAGA message as definitive. But it’s very likely Trump’s political project reached its zenith in a post from the official Trump War Room campaign account earlier this week:
Import the third world
— Trump War Room (@TrumpWarRoom) August 13, 2024
Become the third world pic.twitter.com/MVawiHQSpm
Here, the essential strands of Trump’s “American carnage” tapestry depicting a great nation being destroyed under liberal elite governance come together in a shocking display of racist and xenophobic fear and loathing. There’s the claim that peaceful neighborhoods are being (or will soon be) ravaged by spiraling violent crime. This is factually untrue — crime is at historically low levels and has been dropping in the last couple of years — but easy to suggest via anecdote. There’s the association of this literal invasion of crime and disorder with immigrants and migrants. And there are the Black and brown faces of “third-world” thugs and vagrants despoiling the cities where they are unleashed.
As Charlie Sykes observes in The Atlantic, this hellscape is largely a malign hallucination:
This racist post is consistent with the tone that the Trump campaign has taken in recent weeks — one even uglier than that of months and years past — as the former president struggles to gain traction against Kamala Harris. Like Donald Trump himself, the War Room account has a singular obsession: It regularly highlights stories about migrant crime, posting pictures of Black or brown men who have immigrated to the U.S. and been arrested. A necessary note: There is no evidence of a migrant-led crime spike, or of higher crime rates in cities with the greatest numbers of migrants. Research suggests that immigrants are less likely than their native-born counterparts to be arrested. Trump and his campaign’s obsession with crimes committed by migrants — and their relative silence on other dangers Americans face, such as mass shootings — speaks for itself.
But it’s an old and telling preoccupation for Trump and his followers, dating back to his original lies about Mexican immigrants being disproportionately drug pushers and rapists, and his hostility to the needs and interests of people in “shithole countries” that he views as essentially subhuman.
In every respect, the “import the third world / become the third world” message echoes the infamous teaching of the vastly influential racist novel The Camp of the Saints, reportedly a favorite of two of Trump World’s OG strategists, Steve Bannon (currently in prison) and Stephen Miller (currently planning what Trump has pledged to be “the largest deportation operation in the history of our country”). In that dystopic French book, a staple of far-right brain food for decades and in many countries, immigrants from India and other “third-world” countries literally overwhelm the populations of Europe and the United States in a pestilent human wave that submerges civilization beneath a sea of filth and avarice.
But there’s actually a twist in the MAGA message that makes it even more malevolent. In The Camp of the Saints, the swarthy invaders succeed because the governing elites of the countries they conquer are too weak or too possessed by moral scruples or ideas of “equality” to resist. What Trump & Co. are explicitly embracing is the idea that America’s liberal elites are deliberately engineering an immigrant invasion in order to transform the electorate and stamp out good, clean, God-fearing patriotic values. That bizarre and totally unsubstantiated claim has become even more prominent in 2024, as not only Trump but congressional Republicans have launched a crusade against the phantom threat of non-citizen voting in this presidential election.
So, Team Trump isn’t just embracing the racist fantasy of American greatness slipping away as those rapidly breeding migrants from the third world come to outnumber the childless cat ladies of their host country. They’re going over the brink into the Great Replacement Theory, wherein traitors are deliberately making this demographic and moral catastrophe happen. As I think we are already beginning to see, for all the problems Kamala Harris as an opponent has created for Trump, it’s also convenient to suggest that a multiracial woman from sinful California (famously a place that has had a non-white majority for years) is in charge of the perfidious conversion of America into a third-world country. So we are almost certainly going to see the images in that poisonous Trump War Room post again and again.
