By The opinion
Jun 22, 2024, 8:55 PM EDT
Former Republican President Donald Trump spent the last Saturday meeting with his voters before his first face-to-face debate with President Joe Biden during the 2024 election campaign, which is due to take place next Thursday.
Trump addressed a gathering of Christian conservatives Saturday afternoon in Washington, D.C., referring to his well-known campaign messages while also emphasizing his efforts to undo the federal right to abortion by nominating the justices who helped overturn Roe vs. Wade.
He also renewed his promise to deport millions of Latino immigrants and asked his followers to monitor voters at polling stations.
Trump says he will round up millions of Latinos into mass detention camps and then fantasizes about a 1950s military-style operation called “Operation Wetback” pic.twitter.com/GhulpWi03T
— Biden-Harris HQ (@BidenHQ) June 22, 2024
Later on Saturday, traveled to Philadelphia for a more traditional campaign rally in a key election battleground state and repeated his usual messages again.
Dehumanize immigrants
Trump said Saturday that he had raised the idea of having an “immigrant fighters league” to UFC president Dana White, using the dehumanizing language he routinely uses to describe people who enter the United States illegally.
“I said, ‘Dana, I have an idea: Why don’t you create an immigrant fighter league and have your regular fighter league?’ And then you have the champion of your league (these are the best fighters in the world) fighting the champion of the immigrants. I think the immigrant guy could win, that’s how tough they are,” the presumptive Republican presidential candidate said at a gathering of Christian conservatives in Washington, according to CNN.
Trump added that Dana White: “didn’t really like that idea, but it’s actually not the worst idea I’ve ever had.”
“These people are tough and nasty, bad,” Trump said, speaking before a Christian group, when he said he encouraged Dana White to create a UFC “immigrant league” because they are very bad people.
“These people are tough and they’re nasty, mean” — Trump, speaking to a Christian group, says that he has encouraged Dana White to create a UFC “migrant league” because they’re so tough pic.twitter.com/zGzVOPxjue
— Aaron Rupar (@atrupar) June 22, 2024
The former president repeated the anti-immigrant comments at a campaign rally in Philadelphia later Saturday.
President Joe Biden’s campaign quickly denounced Trump’s anti-immigrant comments Saturday afternoon.
“As befits such a convicted felon, Donald Trump spent his time at a religious conference threatening to arrest Latinos, boasting about taking away Americans’ freedoms, and promising to be even more extreme if he regains power,” the Trump campaign spokeswoman said. Biden Sarafina Chitika. “Trump’s incoherent and unhinged tirade showed voters, in his own words, that he is a threat to our freedoms and that he is too dangerous to be allowed near the White House again.”
Trump has continued to use language frequently used by white supremacists since claiming in an interview last year that undocumented immigrants were “poisoning the blood of our country.”
Biden’s campaign drew a link between Trump’s comments and the political platform of Adolf Hitler, who wrote about “blood pollution” or “blood poisoning” in “Mein Kampf.”
Trump’s back-to-back public appearances on Saturday stand in stark contrast to Biden’s approach to the first of two presidential debates, which will be hosted by CNN on Thursday.
President Joe Biden and his team They will spend the weekend before the debate at Camp Davidporing over briefing folders and holding mock debate sessions as he prepares for his high-stakes meeting with Trump.
Keep reading:
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– Marco Rubio supports Donald Trump’s plans to carry out mass deportations of immigrants
– Latino voters should look at the differences between Biden and Trump’s immigration plans, activists highlight