Trump Plans to Amp Up His Violent, Bigoted Rhetoric in Closing Pitch to Voters

There’s less than a month left in the presidential election, which will not only shape Donald Trump’s political legacy and the nation’s trajectory, but also likely decide whether he’ll face multiple prison sentences. And as he makes his closing argument, Trump is  planning to amp up his violent, fascist rhetoric all the way to Election Day.

In recent conversations with close allies, the former and perhaps future president has stressed that he can’t — as some advisers apparently would like him to — play it safe in these final weeks of campaigning, two people familiar with the matter tell Rolling Stone. “That’s how you lose,” Trump told one small huddle of these allies, one of the sources relays, as he emphasized that, especially on immigration, he needs to slam his foot on the gas.

This belief helps explain Trump’s recent diatribes, which have included talking about dictatorship, repeatedly lying about and demonizing migrants, and encouraging police to be extra violent in ways that resemble The Purge, the popular dystopian-horror movie franchise. 

The other source adds that the ex-president has said lately that he pays close attention to which lines his rally audiences eat up the most and cheer the loudest at — and that Trump specifically noted how his rally attendees applauded and whooped when he reiterated his much-maligned pledge to “be a dictator for one day.” 

During a rally in Wisconsin on Sunday, Trump told the crowd about a conversation he had with Fox News host Sean Hannity. “‘You don’t want to be a dictator, do you?’” he recalled Hannity asking him. Trump continued: “I said, ‘Sean, I only want to be a dictator for one day, and I’m going to close the borders and drill, baby drill. But after that, I never want to be a dictator.’” 

The crowd roared with approval.

On Monday, Trump suggested that immigrants are genetically predisposed to become murderers. “How about allowing people to come to an open border, 13,000 of which were murderers, many of them murdered far more than one person, and they’re now happily living in the United States. You know now a murder, I believe this, it’s in their genes. And we got a lot of bad genes in our country right now,” he said to conservative radio host Hugh Hewitt.

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The idea that there are 13,000 killers roaming the street is false. The number comes from Immigration and Customs Enforcement, which said there are about 13,000 “non-detained” migrants who had been convicted of homicide. The phrase “non-detained” is something of a misnomer, as most of these individuals are actually incarcerated.

In 2020, Trump referenced a similar idea when he told a mostly white crowd of Minnesotans that they have “good genes.” In this instance, he specifically mentioned “the racehorse theory,” a racist idea embraced by Adolf Hitler and proponents of eugenics that claims some white people are genetically superior. If the genetically superior people reproduce, the “theory” goes, the country will be stronger.

Along the same xenophobic lines, Trump has even called for ethnic cleansing. In a post on Truth Social last month, he wrote: “As President I will immediately end the migrant invasion of America. We will stop all migrant flights, end all illegal entries, terminate the Kamala phone app for smuggling illegals (CBP One App), revoke deportation immunity, suspend refugee resettlement, and return Kamala’s illegal migrants to their home countries (also known as remigration).”

Remigration is an idea popular among the far-right in Europe that refers to forcing all immigrants back to their native countries, a form of ethnic cleansing. 

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These threats came as Trump pushed racist lies about Haitian migrants in Springfield, Ohio. He said, falsely, that they were eating cats and dogs. On Tuesday, Trump said that Springfield’s Haitian migrants, who are mostly there legally, are “illegal immigrants as far as I’m concerned.” He previously pledged to “do large deportations from Springfield.”

Recently, Trump publicly urged law enforcement to become more violent. At a campaign rally in late September, he called for “one really violent day” of policing to eradicate retail crime. He continued: “One rough hour — and I mean real rough — the word will get out, and it will end immediately. End immediately.”

During his presidency, Trump demonstrated an obsession with this type of violence. “You just got to kill these people,” he would say to his staff about gang members and drug lords, as Rolling Stone has previously reported. Administration officials began referring to his “American death squads idea.” 

At a rally Wednesday, the former president called for the U.S. military to be purged of supposed “wokeness” and replaced with the values of the most abusive fictional character in Stanley Kubrick’s classic Vietnam War movie, Full Metal Jacket — the drill instructor who (spoiler warning) drives a recruit to murder-suicide. 

Trump has also been fomenting an anti-trans panic, running ads during college football and NFL games that attack Vice President Kamala Harris for supporting gender-affirming treatments for prisoners. The ad ends with the tagline: “Kamala is for they/them. President Trump is for you.” 

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“She wants to do transgender operations on illegal aliens that are in prison,” Trump said during the presidential debate last month.

“It shows that Republicans are desperate right now,” Kelley Robinson, the president of the pro-LGBTQ+ Human Rights Campaign, told The New York Times. “Instead of articulating how they’re going to make the economy better or our schools safer, they’re focused on sowing fear and chaos.”