This is an adapted excerpt from the Sept. 24 episode of “Deadline: White House.”
On Monday, Donald Trump held a rally in Pennsylvania, where he once again repeated lies about Haitian immigrants in Springfield, Ohio. Trump told the crowd that Ohio and Pennsylvania communities will “never be the same” after having been “inundated” with immigrants.
“They will never be — do you think Springfield will never be the same? The fact is, and I’ll say it now, you have to get them the hell out. You have to get them out. I’m sorry. Get them out,” Trump said.
The crowd then erupted into applause with spectators chanting: “Send them back!”
That kind of response from Trump’s rallygoers should hardly come as a surprise. Back in July, the crowd at the Republican National Convention in Milwaukee held up signs reading “MASS DEPORTATION NOW!”
This feels like a throwback to a much darker, more dangerous period of American history. Trump has an entire crowd chanting “Send them back.” The racism is just so raw. But this is who Trump is — it’s not a gaff, it’s not a one-off. This kind of rhetoric is what he’s running on and with every day that passes he’s doubling down on it. What would it say about American culture and the American people, if they look at this man and say: “Yeah, let’s put him back in power. Let’s make him the president of the United States again. Let’s ratify these policies.” Trump keeps talking about mass deportation and yes, some polls suggest a majority of Americans want to do that, but I’m not sure we’ve really come to grips with what that means: millions of people put on trains and busses, rounded up and arrested by the military and police. Children would be separated from their parents. It would be one of the greatest humanitarian disasters of our time. And yet it feels like many Americans are shrugging their shoulders and going, we’re OK with all of this. We are less than six weeks out from the election and this is the choice in front of the American people. This is what it comes down to: It’s not just who we want to make the president of the United States, but really, what kind of a country we want to be.
Charlie Sykes is an MS NOW contributor and the author of the newsletter "To the Contrary."
Allison Detzel is an editor/producer for MS NOW.
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