Jonathan Chait: “Donald Trump’s plan for exciting his base during the 2018 midterm elections was to crank up the threat of a migrant caravan. Fox News ran caravan footage on endless loop, and Trump smashed democratic norms by using the military as a campaign prop, deploying it to the border to ‘defend’ against the supposed threat of violence (which, of course, magically dissipated immediately after the election.)”
“Trump’s party obviously fared terribly in the midterms, as one would expect from a deeply unpopular president. But he did crank up historically high levels of Republican turnout, and was hardly mistaken in seeing the tactic as a success.”
“The caravan episode has become the model for Trump’s reelection strategy. Trump hypes the threat from a small band of telegenic miscreants who may pose no threat to the average person, but look scary enough in a tightly-framed video clip, and whom he can link to his opponent and promise to brutalize. In this case, the enemy is small bands of vandals that have lingered at the tail end of the George Floyd demonstrations. Trump has used the danger to justify a surge of federal troops, in the hoops that they would create footage of confrontations that would present Trump as the heroic vanquisher of chaos, this time inside America’s borders.”