Trump thinks the border got him elected in 2016. He’s convinced it will do so again

Donald Trump turned his back to the crowd and stared up at the screen. Ominous music rang out. For the next minute and a half, the former president and his audience in Atlanta stood and silently watched clips of news reports of immigrants in the country without legal permission committing horrific crimes.

When the montage ended, Trump said out loud what he has been telling his advisers in private for weeks: that, in his view, immigration is the “No. 1” issue in the 2024 election.

“That beats out the economy. That beats it all out to me; it’s not even close,” Trump said of the immigration issue, after playing the video Tuesday night. “The United States is now an occupied country. But on Nov. 5, 2024, that will be liberation day in America.”

In the final weeks of a campaign that the former president has been waging more or less since his first year out of office, Trump is going with his gut, doubling down on the rhetoric that he believes won him the 2016 election and using immigration and the border to form the core of his closing message to voters.

Those instincts are at odds with the data and with some of his advisers.

Trump has told aides that he beat Hillary Clinton in 2016 with the border but that in 2020, the border was “fixed” — illegal crossings had dropped to a dramatic low in part because of the coronavirus pandemic — so he could not use it as an issue against Joe Biden. He thinks immigration is more potent than ever as a political message, after the record levels of border crossings under the Biden-Harris administration and after he helped kill a bipartisan border security bill that the administration tried to pass.

But neither public nor private surveys support Trump’s theory of the race. Voters frequently rank the economy and the high cost of living as their most important issue.

Trump has spent considerable time and energy in recent days at economy-themed events, pitching proposals to make car loan interest fully tax deductible and to offer companies tax breaks and other benefits if they move their manufacturing to the United States or keep it there.

But Trump draws his energy from his rallies, and it is the reaction on immigration he is getting there that is helping convince him that the issue is better for him than the economy.

When he launches into an immigration tirade, Trump gets animated, florid, dark and tribal. And there is a difference in how the audience and the news media responds, compared with the response he gets when he talks about grocery prices, taxes or tariffs. It gets more attention, and it always has.

Trump has told allies that he thinks crowds get “bored” when he talks too much about the economy, according to a person close to him.

And Trump has a new reason for focusing on the issue: He has told rally audiences and people close to him that his opposition to illegal immigration saved his life.

In Butler, Pennsylvania, in July, Trump turned his head to look at a chart of illegal border crossings on a screen at the very moment a would-be assassin’s bullet missed his skull by less than an inch and grazed his ear. He has given the chart, and the issue it illustrated, an almost mythical status. “If you think about it, illegal immigration saved my life; I’m the only one,” Trump told a crowd in Aurora, Colorado. “Usually, it’s the opposite.”

Some in Trump’s orbit, like his influential adviser Stephen Miller, fully support his instinct to emphasize immigration as the top issue for voters. Other allies worry that some of his more extreme immigration rhetoric — like his baseless claim that Haitian migrants are eating cats and dogs — risks turning off moderate voters whose support he needs.

Trump has been pushing advisers to get more immigration content, and they are obliging. Miller — the hardest of immigration hard-liners — has been flying more often on Trump’s plane since the summer and playing a big role in shaping his closing message. Miller declined to comment for this article.

Last month, Trump was intent on visiting Springfield, Ohio, after spreading unfounded rumors that Haitian migrants there were eating the pets of the city’s residents. He declared publicly that he would soon travel to Springfield.

Ohio is not considered a battleground state, but Trump thought it would be politically powerful to show up to highlight the perils of undocumented immigration. (The immigrants in question were in the country legally, including many who qualified for Temporary Protected Status after fleeing violence and chaos in Haiti.) But after bomb threats closed Springfield schools and threats against Haitians spiked, local Republican officials pleaded with Trump to stay away to avoid bringing further chaos to a city already under severe strain. Ohio’s Republican governor, Mike DeWine, added his voice, condemning Trump for smearing hardworking Haitians.

Many on Trump’s team privately thought that a visit to Springfield could do more political harm than good. At a Univision town hall broadcast Wednesday, Trump continued to insist that he would visit Springfield. But no date has been announced.

Instead of going to Springfield, the compromise within the former president’s campaign was for Trump to give the speech in Aurora, a city he has used to exaggerate the harms inflicted by migrant gangs. Like Ohio, Colorado is not a battleground state, but Trump was determined to make the visit to highlight his personal top issue.

Speaking there Oct. 11, Trump highlighted his desire to use the Alien Enemies Act — last used during World War II to place people of Japanese descent, among others, in internment camps — to deport gang leaders. The law lets officials make sweeping deportations of people from countries that have invaded or are at war with the United States, or that have made “predatory incursions.” While the Supreme Court has upheld past uses of the law, it is not clear whether the justices would allow a president to stretch it to encompass drug cartel activity as opposed to the actions of a foreign government.

Even when Trump does talk about the economy, he tends to bring his points back to immigration. When The New York Times asked the Trump campaign for its plan to lower the cost of housing, the campaign’s response was that mass deportations would increase the supply of housing and therefore reduce costs.

Asked to explain Trump’s focus in the closing days of the race, a Trump spokesperson, Brian Hughes, said, “President Trump rightfully recognizes that Kamala Harris’ porous border is at the heart of so many issues, whether it is high housing prices, low wages or overwhelmed hospitals and schools. An open border means that taxpayer dollars are wasted on illegal immigrants instead of benefiting citizens. President Trump’s closing message is all about putting Americans first and restoring prosperity.”

Chuck Rocha, a Democratic strategist who has looked extensively at voting patterns, said Trump was taking a gamble that playing to fear would win him more votes than it costs him. He said some of Trump’s rhetoric might appeal to white suburban women troubled by the end of Roe v. Wade but also fearful of the influx of migrants, while at the same time possibly turning off other voters.

“He’s got a calculated risk option,” Rocha said.

Trump’s views on immigration, and the country’s, have evolved over time.

Immigration was not an issue Trump lingered on in 2011 when he considered running for president. Three years later, as illegal border crossings of unaccompanied children increased under President Barack Obama, the issue dominated conservative news media and became a focal point of Trump’s kickoff campaign speech in June 2015.

Now immigration is a powerful motivating issue in a general election, the second-most important for many voters. And one of Trump’s signature policy proposals — building a border wall — is now broadly popular, expanding beyond Trump’s base.

Trump already dominates among the voters who care most about immigration, so it remains unclear how much room he has to grow his vote share by hammering on the issue.

Voters have very clearly and steadily ranked the economy as their top issue this election, far ahead of abortion and immigration. Even Republicans were nearly twice as likely to list the economy as the most important issue to their vote over immigration in the latest New York Times/Siena College poll.

Trump is favored over Harris on both the economy and immigration. But while Trump’s lead on the economy has narrowed in some polls, his lead on immigration remains wide and consistent.

As he has pummeled Democrats for the influx of migrants, Harris and Biden have scrambled to rebrand themselves as tough on immigration, including by pushing Mexico to step up its own enforcement to keep migrants from reaching the U.S. border. Harris was pressed Wednesday on her positions on immigration in an interview with Fox News host Bret Baier. She conceded that there remained systemic problems.

Harris has also sought to use Trump’s opposition to the bipartisan border legislation to counter that the former president has no interest in solving the problems there and wants only to exploit it as a political issue.

In a speech last month in Wisconsin, Trump promised to “liberate” the state from an “invasion of murderers, rapists, hoodlums, drug dealers, thugs and vicious gang members.”

“Nothing can be as serious as this — because this gets down to the very fabric of our society,” he said. “Your way of life.”

Trump stressed the same point in Atlanta on Tuesday night.

“After years of building up other countries, we will protect our borders, defend our families and protect our American suburbs, cities and towns,” he declared.

This article originally appeared in The New York Times.

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