In a clip that left-wing critics have compared to the infamous Willie Horton attack ad, President Trump blamed Democratic policies for allowing convicted cop killer Luis Bracamontes to illegally enter, re-enter, and stay in the country. The video draws broad and largely illogical comparisons between Bracamontes — who repeatedly entered the country illegally — and the vast migrant caravan from Honduras still thousands of miles away from the U.S.
On the facts, Trump is incorrect. Joe Arpaio, the Republican sheriff pardoned by Trump himself for criminal contempt of court, actually freed Bracamontes “for reasons unknown” after an arrest for drug charges in 1998 after he had illegally entered the U.S. multiple times. Technically, both Republican and Democratic failures led to Bracamontes’ rampage, but rather than focusing on facts, Trump is betting on videos like these baiting Democrats into overstepping on immigration rhetoric in the final days before the midterms.
Democrats could easily counter Trump’s false equivalencies and fearmongering with simple logic. Many cases like Bracamontes’ stem from a failure of enforcement, not a lack of new laws.
Instead, however, they reach to embrace Trump’s most extreme straw men, the ones meant to smear them.
[Also read: Michael Avenatti: Democrats will suffer Dukakis-level blowout if they stay soft on immigration]
When Trump issues overblown attacks toward a migrant caravan that border control will rightfully repel, the Left lurches instantly toward the “racist” label, implying that mere belief in American sovereignty and demand for an orderly, lawful immigration system is an expression of white supremacy. Certainly, a minority of Republicans impulsively fear immigration for racist or xenophobic reasons rather than economic or legal ones. But it will backfire if Democrats demonize everyone who wants to keep criminal immigrants out of the U.S.
Trump does himself no favors by attacking the bounds of legal immigration. But by ruthlessly and viscerally castigating violent illegal immigrants, Trump has baited the Left into calling border enforcement racist. That Trump’s conflation was false was lost amid the initial headlines that the ad itself was racist. This reinforces for a lot of people that Democrats will continue to attack Republicans until we have open borders.
To be clear, it’s doubtful that this is a part of some long-term strategy that Trump intricately designed to troll Democrats into embracing radical immigration policies. (They had already embraced those positions before former presidential candidate Hillary Clinton was nominated — recall that she and Sen. Bernie Sanders, I-Vt., both embraced a “zero deportation” position during the 2016 primaries.) But Trump knows how to read the room, and he’s excelled in making the Left overreach. No matter how tonally questionable or factually wrong Trump’s Bracamontes ad might be, it’s a trap, and it’s probably already worked.
