After "Trump War Room"—an official social media account of former President Donald Trump's campaign posted a racist meme claiming Vice President Kamala Harris will ruin "your neighborhood" by "importing the third world," people were quick to post reminder of what life was like during Trump's first term.
Side-by-side images, labeled “Your Neighborhood Under Trump” and “Your Neighborhood Under Kamala,” respectively, depict a peaceful residential street alongside a 2023 Getty photo of recent migrants to the U.S. sitting outside New York’s Roosevelt Hotel, awaiting temporary housing.
The post came after Trump—who has previously said his administration will initiate mass deportations in the event he takes the White House—told X owner Elon Musk that undocumented migrants "are criminals that make our criminals look like nice people" during an interview that made headlines for being plagued by technical issues.
The post included the following caption:
“Import the third world. Become the third world."
You can see it below.
@TrumpWarRoom/X
However, it's worth noting once again that life wasn't a bed of roses under Trump, despite what the meme might claim.
Well over 1.2 million Americans have died since the COVID-19 pandemic began during Trump's final year in office. Many of these people could have been saved had Trump's administration taken the situation seriously from the start.
Many prominent Trump surrogates have downplayed the fact that Trump raged against shutdowns, attacked healthcare professionals, frequently undermined the efforts of the White House COVID-19 Task Force, and openly pushed conspiracy theories about the virus and the vaccination campaign that were embraced by his followers, hindering the country's ability to rebound from the pandemic's economic shock.
Supply chain shortages were also a fact of life due to COVID-19 disruptions and there were several weeks at the height of the pandemic in spring 2020 when millions of people couldn't find a single roll of toilet paper anywhere, the result at least in part of panic buying as state and local governments issued stay-at-home orders that were largely ignored by Trump's followers.
People were quick to point out just how inaccurate the Trump campaign's meme really is.
Racism is of course nothing new for Trump, who last year claimed that immigrants are "poisoning the blood of our country," echoing fascists like genocidal Nazi Party leader Adolf Hitler, who wrote about "blood poisoning" in his book Mein Kampf.
Harris's supporters have accused the Trump campaign of leaning into racist tropes due to her Tamil Indian and Afro-Jamaican ancestry and Harris recently called out Trump for claiming she "happened to turn Black” and suggesting that “all of a sudden, she made a turn” in her racial identity in remarks he made at the National Association of Black Journalists (NABJ) convention in Chicago.
The New York Times recently reported that Republican donors and Trump’s advisers have urged him to focus on criticizing Harris’s policies and staying on message, rather than repeatedly questioning her racial identity as he has done over the past two weeks, out of concern his rhetoric could alienate voters.
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