Welcome to Margin of Error, a politics column from Tom Scocca, editor of the Indignity newsletter, examining the apocalyptic politics and coverage of Campaign 2024.
Wednesday night, in Long Island's 16,000-seat Nassau Coliseum, Donald Trump told the crowd at a rally for his presidential campaign that the United States—and particularly New York City, a few miles away—had been overrun with criminal immigrants, "people coming from jails out of the Congo in Africa."
The former and would-be future president continued:
They're coming from the Congo, they're coming from Africa, they're coming from the Middle East, they're coming from all over the world—Asia! A lot of it coming from Asia. And what's happening to our country is we're just destroying the fabric of life in our country, and we're not going to take it any longer, and you got to get rid of these people. Give me a shot.
This was spectacularly racist, explicitly racist against the majority of all the nonwhite people on Earth, the most racist thing I'd seen a presidential candidate—Donald Trump included—say in my lifetime. It was a barrage straight out of a Ku Klux Klan rally: Congo! Africa! Middle East! Asia! We're not going to take it any longer! Get rid of these people!
I would have said it was obviously shocking, except both shock and obviousness have become tenuous concepts in American politics. When I went to look up references to the quote after seeing it go by on social media, I began to worry that the original poster might have made it up for clout; I saw no mention of Trump talking about "the Congo" that night on Google News or in major reporters' Twitter accounts.
But I went to C-SPAN and there Trump was, saying it. The Nassau County crowd—in what the New York Post recently reported that U.S. News had rated the safest community in the country—cheered as Trump vowed to drive out the immigrant crime menace. "November 5 will be your Liberation Day," he told them.
Apparently Trump has been telling people at his events about the threat of criminals from the Congo and beyond for months. The Washington Post put it into a fact-check roundup in March ("no such decline in Congo’s prison population is shown in the data"); critic at large A.O. Scott of the New York Times, in a "Critic's Notebook" item reviewing Trump's speech after his criminal conviction, wrote about it knowingly, as if it were old news: "A citizen looking for campaign issues might find some boilerplate in a peroration that conjured images of Venezuela and Congo emptying their prisons and asylums onto America’s streets."
Yet the Times hadn't ever directly reported on those remarks, and it still hasn't. In its story from Nassau Coliseum, the paper wrote that Trump had "continued to stoke fear around immigration," and then quoted only the later part of the passage:
"We’re just destroying the fabric of life in our country," Mr. Trump said, referring to Democrats' immigration policies. "And we're not going to take it any longer. And you got to get rid of these people. Give me a shot."
New York Times
The Washington Post's story on the rally reported that Trump "brushed off criticism for dehumanizing migrants": "'You got to get rid of these people,' Trump said, alluding to his pledge for mass deportations." Politico described Trump's speech as delivering "fiery hardline messages about crime and immigration."
Nine years into the Trump era of presidential politics, it still seems impossible for campaign-trail journalists to describe him or his project. Those accounts of Trump's performance on Long Island were mostly accurate, on their own terms, and even critical of him, while also being completely inadequate to the task.
Consider the one certifiably false claim in the Times passage: that Trump was "referring to Democrats' immigration policies." What Trump was referring to, in the literal text of his speech, was some agenda by which the United States is importing convicted criminals released from other countries' prisons. The Biden administration has no policy that does anything like what Trump was talking about.
It's tempting to conclude that therefore Trump must have been talking about nothing, that those nonexistent thousands and millions of immigrant criminals were simply one more empty oratorical flourish from the country's emptiest orator. Hasn't he been saying things like this ever since he came down the escalator talking about Mexicans "bringing drugs" and "bringing crime"? Isn't it just a posture, albeit an ugly one?
But the ever-expanding factual vacuum of Trump's message sucks more and more real things into it. Everyone understood he had no possible case that he had won the 2020 election, either, and then after two months of his seemingly pointless ranting about it, a mob was smashing into the Capitol to try to steal the victory for him—to steal it back, as they'd been told.
Trump and his running mate, JD Vance, have been telling people that Haitian immigrants are stealing and eating pets in Springfield, Ohio, and now Vance has moved on to saying that the Haitians are spreading disease. Vance knows that these things aren't true, and he admitted that he knows they're not true. It doesn't matter, because he's not telling his voters that he and Trump will protect their pets and promote public health. He's telling them they'll get rid of the Haitians.
The bomb threats that Springfield is now getting, day after day, aren't stopping Vance, because the bomb threats go with his message. Even if the Democrats and the journalists say that the Haitians are in this country legally, Vance said they are not. Trump has promised he will do mass deportations in Springfield. He has promised that he will deport millions of undocumented immigrants from around the country, many millions more than the Democrats and the journalists say exist. He said in the debate that he will use local cops to help him out.
This gets refracted, through the conventions of campaign coverage, into "messages about crime and immigration," because crime and immigration are standard political issues. People rank them on their lists of the subjects they're concerned about, when the pollsters ask them to rank their concerns. Concerns about crime and immigration, the Times recounted in a piece about Congress and the New York State Democratic Party this week, are understood to have cost Democrats control of the House in the 2022 midterm, in races in places like Nassau County. Trump was simply pressing an issue where he sees an advantage.
But if a President Trump asks the cops to deport people for him, the cops will find people to deport. People from Africa, from the Middle East, from Asia. The "Democrats' immigration policies," here, are the 1965 Immigration Act and constitutional birthright citizenship. He told 16,000 cheering people what he plans to do. Was that news?
