Trump’s consistent message online and onstage: Be afraid

Former President Donald Trump swings wildly from topic to topic at his rallies, veering from tariffs to immigration policy to the problems with electric vehicles. But he tends to return to the same apocalyptic message.

“You won’t have a country anymore,” Trump said at a rally in Las Vegas last month. “You’re pretty close to not having one. You better hope I get elected.”

It is a forecast Trump has made repeatedly over the last year in speeches and interviews and on social media as he campaigns to return to the White House. Although he has long used fear as a tool to stir up his conservative base and sway undecided voters, Trump has taken his doomsday prophesying to a new extreme, increasing both its frequency and scope.

He regularly predicts that if he loses to Vice President Kamala Harris in November, America will be ruined. World War III will break out, most likely prompting a global nuclear catastrophe. There will no longer be an America. Israel will cease to exist. Murderous immigrant gangs will overrun cities, small towns, the state of Colorado and the entire country. Factories will shutter. Farmers will lose their farms. The United States will face an economic “bloodbath.”

During a speech Saturday in Wisconsin, Trump declared that immigrants would “walk into your kitchen, they’ll cut your throat” and that “your towns, your cities, your country is being destroyed.” He stopped about 20 minutes in to make light of his dire rhetoric.

“Isn’t this a wonderful and inspiring speech?” Trump said facetiously as the crowd chuckled. “I got people sitting in the front row, they’re going, ‘Oh, my God.’ They thought they’d be out there jumping up and down. ‘Make America great again.’ We’re going to do that. Don’t worry; we haven’t gotten to that part yet. I’m just saying. This is a dark — this is a dark speech.”

Karoline Leavitt, a Trump campaign spokesperson, defended Trump’s language and said it reflected his view of the dire reality the country faces. Pointing to inflation, crime and the fentanyl crisis, Leavitt said Trump “recognizes the declining state of our country and offers an optimistic vision for the future to make America safe, secure and wealthy again.”

Trump has made fear an animating force throughout his political career. In 2016, he stoked tensions around immigration by branding Mexican immigrants as “murderers” and “rapists.” And during his 2020 campaign, he took the same tone as he stirred up concerns over urban crime to try to appeal to white suburban voters.

During his third run for the White House, Trump has revived his alarmist predictions and expanded them to the globe. In nearly every speech, Trump cautions that the United States is on the verge of a global war that only he can prevent. Falsely claiming that he presided over an era of worldwide peace, Trump argues that continued Democratic leadership will prolong the conflicts in Ukraine and the Gaza Strip to devastating effects.

Last week, he raised the specter of an American ground war, falsely telling hundreds of people in North Carolina that President Joe Biden and Harris were “not going to be satisfied until they send American kids over to Ukraine” to “die across the ocean.” Biden has voiced opposition to doing so.

And at most rallies this year, Trump has warned that there will be a calamitous nuclear conflict if he does not win in the fall. “You’re going to end up in World War III,” he said at the Las Vegas rally. “You’re going to have a nuclear holocaust if we’re not careful. These people have no idea.”

Sarafina Chitika, a Harris campaign spokesperson, accused Trump of hiding his lack of policy behind his rhetoric.

“Donald Trump is left with nothing to sell the American people but darkness and lies,” she said in a statement. “Instead of offering solutions, he peddles conspiracy theories and trashes our country.”

Still, Trump continues to reserve his darkest predictions for discussing immigration. At several rallies this year, he has signaled that this is a strategic choice, seeming to blame his retreat from such language for hurting him in the 2020 election.

“I think in 2016, I won maybe because of the border,” he said in Tucson, Arizona. “And in 2020, I couldn’t talk about the border. My people would say, ‘Sir, you’re wasting your time talking about the border.’”

As he campaigns this year, Trump has seized on a surge in unauthorized immigrants crossing the border during the Biden administration. Although that increase has dropped significantly in recent months, Trump continues to portray immigrants as an invading force bent on destroying America, often distorting facts or data as he conjures up a “migrant crime wave” that national statistics do not support.

Ignoring the substantial share of migrants comprising families with children, Trump broadly characterizes those crossing the border as violent criminals or mentally ill people. He has repeatedly likened unauthorized immigrants to Hannibal Lecter, the fictional cannibalistic serial killer from “The Silence of the Lambs,” and he has made baseless claims that other countries have deliberately emptied their prisons and “insane asylums” to send their populations to the United States.

More recently, screens at his rallies have displayed images with fearmongering captions as he speaks.

One, shown at several campaign events and shared by the Trump campaign on social media, appears to be a digitally generated depiction of a man with a knife stalking a woman in a dark alley, with the caption, “No one is safe with Kamala’s open borders.” Another references his debunked claims that a Venezuelan gang has taken over an apartment complex in Aurora, Colorado. It’s an image of tattooed Latino men with the caption, “Your new apartment managers if Kamala’s re-elected.”

In two recent speeches meant to appeal to Jewish voters, he predicted that Israel would cease to exist within two years if he lost in November. “If I don’t win, I believe Israel will be eradicated — and you can’t let that happen,” he said. Then he urged a rabbi in the room to “get everybody together, and you have to get them to vote.”

It was one of several speeches in which Trump tailored his dark vision to the specific groups he was speaking to. At a roundtable discussion about agriculture in rural Pennsylvania, he warned that a Harris victory would raise energy costs so much that farmers “won’t have a farm very long, I will tell you that.”

At times, he shifts to focus not on the future but on an alternate version of the present. At a manufacturing center in North Carolina last week, he defended the protectionist trade policies he adopted as president by insisting they had staved off precipitous economic collapse.

“You wouldn’t have anything left in this state if I didn’t do what I did,” Trump said. “This building would be now shuttered, closed, empty, no jobs. And now it’s thriving.”

This article originally appeared in The New York Times.

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