mobanmarketDonald Trump is “not normal,” so the nation has been forced to adjust its perceptions and lower its standards while the media continues to be perplexed about exactly how to cover the kind of person now leading the Republican Party and running the U.S. government.
But with the midterm elections less than a week away, the tweeting of a “reprehensible” pair of “vile” and “racist” campaign videos by the president over the last 24-hours (here and here) was described by outraged critics as the kind of propaganda put out into the world by an unhinged white nationalist or right-wing troll, not the so-called “leader of the free world.”
Of the two videos, the one featuring convicted murderer Luis Bracamontes—found guilty in the 2014 killing of two California sheriff deputies—has been drawing the most attention as it explicitly blames the killing of the officers on the immigration policies of Democrats. The video falsely claims: “Illegal immigrant, Luis Bracamontes, killed our people! … Democrats let him into our country … Democrats let him stay.” It also pairs the murderous remarks of Bracamontes during his trial with dramatic footage of Central American immigrants making their way along roads or slamming against what appear to be border-crossing barricades.
“This could be a video tweeted out from a far-right, neo-Nazi group,” tweeted journalist Mehdi Hasan. “But it was tweeted out by the president of the United States. And folks are still debating if he’s a racist/anti-Semite/white nationalist. Sigh.”
As Steven Collinson, political analyst for CNN, writes:
“This is nauseating nativism,” said Bloomberg‘s Eli Lake in response to the videos. “Without question, a racist ad,” said radio host Jamie Weinstein.
The other ads does its best to depict the Democrats as anarchist Black Blockers and violent Antifa activists, a laughable comparison if it wasn’t increasingly taken as true by the Fox News faithful and the tens of millions who get their political education from sites like Breitbart or right-wing AM radio.
Journalist Chris Hayes called the president’s closing argument for the midterms, as evidenced by the videos, “straight-up racist incitement” – and noted that the videos arrive “not less than a week after a MAGA cultist tried to assassinate 13 officials and critics and 4 days after a Nazi cited WH-led immigration as his cause for committing slaughter” at the Tree of Life synagogue in Pittsburgh.
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