Donald Trump has escalated his anti-immigrant rhetoric in recent weeks, using false claims and dehumanizing language to hammer migrants as evil, animalistic, and intent on sowing chaos in American towns and cities. A recent analysis by Politico supports that characterization, with the outlet reporting Sunday that Trump has “demonized minority groups and used increasingly dark, graphic imagery to talk about migrants” in every speech at his last 20 campaign events. The former president has railed against immigrants for as long as he’s been in politics, having repeatedly vowed since 2015 to orchestrate the largest deportation operation in U.S. history. But he has vastly ramped up his charged rhetoric during his re-election campaign’s final sprint, spreading wild falsehoods about Haitian migrants eating pets in Springfield, Ohio, bloviating about non-white immigrants’ “bad genes,” and, just this week, calling for the death penalty for immigrants who kill U.S. citizens. “So immigrants are crime. Immigrants are anarchy. They’re taking their jobs, but now they’re also animals who are going to kill us or eat our pets or eat us,” Ruth Ben-Ghiat, a history professor at New York University, told Politico. “That’s how you get people to feel that whatever is done to them, as in mass deportation, rounding them up, putting them in camps, is OK.”
