With Control of Congress at Stake, Trump Reprises a Favorite Theme: Fear Immigrants

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Part of the migrant caravan heading toward the United States. Days before the midterms, President Trump is making immigrants his singular focus.CreditCreditGuillermo Arias/Agence France-Presse — Getty Images

By Michael D. Shear

Nov. 1, 2018

WASHINGTON — President Trump’s closing argument is now clear: Build tent cities for migrants. End birthright citizenship. Fear the caravan. Send active-duty troops to the border. Refuse asylum.

Immigration has been the animating force of the Trump presidency, and now — facing the possibility that Republicans will lose control of Congress on Tuesday — the president has fully embraced a dark, anti-immigrant message in the hope that stoking fear will motivate voters to show up for his party’s candidates across the country.

Eager to shift the national conversation away from the Pittsburgh synagogue massacre and the pipe bombs delivered by a Trump supporter, the president’s political team has in recent days urged him to use his bully pulpit to ratchet up the nation’s sense of alarm about the dangers of migrants heading for the border.

It did not take much convincing. On Wednesday afternoon, Mr. Trump tweeted out an inflammatory 53-second campaign ad featuring a Hispanic murder suspect laughing about killing police officers as images show migrants surging past barriers in Central America. The president did little to hide his intentions: Immigrants will kill you and the Democrats are to blame.

“It is outrageous what the Democrats are doing to our Country,” Mr. Trump wrote in the tweet. “Vote Republican now!”

White House officials said the president would underscore those same themes on Thursday afternoon when he is expected to deliver remarks about illegal immigration and the need for heightened border security from the Roosevelt Room of the White House before his departure for an evening campaign rally in Missouri.

For the president, the late-in-the-game focus on immigration is a natural return to the most enduring strategy of his career as a public figure. Using immigrants to generate fear was a central tool that he employed to grab the public’s attention when he was just a celebrity. And it was the key to his winning the 2016 presidential campaign.

Now, with polls showing Democrats ahead in many critical House races, Mr. Trump is using presidential brute force to all but take over the campaign communications strategies for Republican candidates across the country. In tweets, rally speeches, interviews, campaign ads and off-the-cuff remarks to reporters, the president has made immigrants the singular object of his attention.

In just the last few days, Mr. Trump has vowed to shut down the southern border to migrants claiming asylum and deploy thousands of active-duty troops to block the entry of a Central American caravan of families that is still hundreds of miles from the border between Mexico and the United States.

He has pledged to build tent cities along the border to indefinitely hold immigrants that he falsely describes as mostly criminals, gang members and felons who pose a danger to voters in the United States. And he has mused about ending birthright citizenship with an executive order, despite opposition from within his own party and broad criticism from legal scholars.

Mr. Trump is betting that a relentless focus on the threat he envisions from south-of-the-border immigrants, combined with his repeated assertion that Democrats are to blame for letting them into the country, will energize conservative supporters. And he is hoping that the dark imagery will not alienate suburban voters — especially women — who have already been abandoning Republicans in droves.

It is a risky bet. Last year, the Republican candidate for governor in Virginia lost after running dark ads warning of the dangers of marauding, MS-13 gangs in the state. And some congressional Republicans have grimaced at the president’s determined effort to shift the conversation away from issues like low unemployment, tax cuts, conservative Supreme Court justices and reduced regulation.

At the beginning of the week, Mr. Trump’s campaign put out a gauzy, 60-second television ad featuring a suburban woman who frets about the possibility that the economic recovery could be fleeting. But the attention paid to that ad was quickly overtaken by the president’s comments about the dangers of the Central American caravan and his new ad about the cop-killing immigrant.

Still, the issue has clearly put some Democratic candidates on the defensive, especially in conservative states where Mr. Trump won by wide margins in 2016. In the last several days, Senator Claire McCaskill, Democrat of Missouri, has embraced some of the president’s anti-immigrant messaging as she fights for re-election.

“I do not want our borders overrun,” Ms. McCaskill said in an interview on Fox News on Monday. “And I support the president’s efforts to make sure they’re not.”

Maggie Haberman in New York contributed reporting.