This week’s debate between Vice President Kamala Harris and former President Donald Trump gave Americans the starkest split-screen so far of the two wildly different people vying to lead their government.
While Harris focused on specific policy proposals rooted in verifiable numbers and hands-on experience, Trump, who usually relies on applause and lazy superlatives to sell his so-called vision to supporters, was clearly out of his depth.
So he did what many small men with large egos do: He picked an imaginary enemy to attack, a bogeyman he’s been constructing since the first moments he officially got into politics in 2015 — immigrants.
To make matters worse, this deflection comes with a tsunami of lies. Tuesday’s debate was no different.
Trump repeated his lie about “millions of people pouring into our country from prisons and jails.”
In response to a question about the economy, Trump repeated his lie about “millions of people pouring into our country from prisons and jails, from mental institutions and insane asylums.” They’re not.
He presented noncitizen voting in federal and state elections as rampant, when studies from the nonpartisan Brennan Center and every other legitimate institution have found it to be “vanishingly rare.”
Trump claimed that “we have a new form of crime. It’s called migrant crime. And it’s happening at levels that nobody thought possible.” Never mind that violent crime across the board is down, but decades of studies have reached the same conclusion: Undocumented immigrants are significantly less likely to commit crime than people born in the United States.
And then there was a new low.
“In Springfield, they’re eating the dogs,” he said. “The people that came in. They’re eating the cats. They’re eating — eating the pets of the people that live there.”
The claim feels too deranged to even legitimize with a fact check, but, for what it’s worth, officials in Springfield, Ohio, have repeatedly said there is no evidence for Trump’s claim, which appears to have originated in part from a third-hand anecdote in an obscure Facebook group.
It’s easy to treat these lies as laughable and bizarre, especially when they reach such dizzying depths of absurdity. But the harsh truth is that these lies and the rhetoric they’re couched in have real-world effects.
Republican officials have used lies about noncitizen voting as cover to raid the homes of voting rights activists.
Republican officials have used lies about noncitizen voting as cover to raid the homes of voting rights activists and purge naturalized citizens from the voter rolls.
Even more chillingly, the El Paso, Texas, shooter who killed 23 people in a Walmart in 2019 echoed Trump’s dehumanizing anti-immigrant rhetoric, with investigators saying that he posted a screed online saying the slaughter was a response to “the Hispanic invasion of Texas.”
The white supremacist “great replacement” theory — which claims elites are secretly transporting nonwhite undocumented immigrants to take over the United States — has now become normalized within Trump’s wing of the Republican Party.
To make matters more maddening, Americans do want good-faith solutions that restore order at the border without obscuring people’s humanity. They do want to hear solutions about fixing a broken immigration system.
And yet, Congress has failed to pass a comprehensive immigration bill for decades, largely because deranged rhetoric like Trump’s has made the issue too divisive for any approach to get consensus. As Harris reminded voters onstage, Trump single-handedly tanked a bipartisan border bill this year to continue running on a platform of xenophobia. (In a twist, when asked a difficult question about this at the debate, he deflected by talking about crowd size at his rallies instead.) This is where Harris has an opportunity to again highlight the contrasts and expand the framework to the many immigrants who have already built lives in the United States. She could highlight the Biden-Harris administration’s work to keep American families with noncitizen members together. She could reiterate her support for a path to citizenship for Dreamers. She could seize on Trump’s threat to rip American families apart with the largest mass deportation effort in American history. And she could call out his own hypocrisy. The truth is Trump owes his success to immigrants. The first hotels under Trump family ownership were established by his grandfather, who emigrated from the Kingdom of Bavaria. Undocumented immigrants helped build Trump Tower, according to court records, and helped maintain the Trump National Golf Club in Bedminster, New Jersey, according to former workers. (Trump has said he did nothing wrong and denied knowing about undocumented workers at his properties.) And Trump’s hateful rhetoric about immigrants launched him from a second-rate presidential candidate to the leader of the Republican Party. And as the 2024 presidential campaign enters its final months, you can expect Trump to double down on his insidious rhetoric to distract from his own ignorance on the issues and woefully unbalanced temperament. But it’s not second nature for Americans to hate their neighbors. When given the choice between good-faith conversations about fixing the broken immigration system in a way that makes for a better America or doubling down on failed enforcement policies that have proven ineffective and would destroy untold numbers of American families, I believe voters will choose the former. And that is the choice they’ll be facing at the ballot box in just a matter of weeks. For more thought-provoking insights from Alicia Menendez, Michael Steele and Symone Sanders-Townsend, watch “The Weekend” every Saturday and Sunday at 8 a.m. ET on MSNBC.
Alicia Menendez
Alicia Menendez is a co-host of "The Weeknight," which airs Monday through Friday at 7 p.m. ET on MSNBC. She is also the host of the “Latina to Latina” podcast and the author of “The Likeability Trap: How to Break Free and Succeed As You Are.”
Evan Brechtel
Evan Brechtel is a segment producer on MSNBC's "The Weekend." 
