In “Unity” Speech, Trump Demonizes Migrants, Spreads Lies & Embraces Authoritarianism

NERMEEN SHAIKH: Donald Trump accepted the Republican nomination on Thursday night, just five days after surviving an assassination attempt. Trump gave the longest acceptance speech in convention history, clocking in at over 90 minutes. He began by recounting what happened in Butler, Pennsylvania, on Saturday after a bullet grazed his right ear as he was giving a speech.

DONALD TRUMP: I stand before you in this arena only by the grace of Almighty God. In watching the reports over the last few days, many people say it was a providential moment. Probably was.

When I rose, surrounded by Secret Service, the crowd was confused because they thought I was dead. And there was great, great sorrow. I could see that on their faces as I looked out. They didn’t know I was looking out. They thought it was over. But I could see it, and I wanted to do something to let them know I was OK. I raised my right arm, looked at the thousands and thousands of people that were breathlessly waiting, and started shouting, “Fight! Fight! Fight!”

CROWD: Fight! Fight! Fight! Fight! Fight! Fight! Fight! Fight! Fight!

NERMEEN SHAIKH: During his acceptance speech, Trump repeatedly demonized migrants seeking refuge in the United States. Trump vowed to carry out the largest deportation campaign in U.S. history.

DONALD TRUMP: The greatest invasion in history is taking place right here in our country. They are coming in from every corner of the Earth, not just from South America, but from Africa, Asia, the Middle East. They’re coming from everywhere. They’re coming at levels that we’ve never seen before. It is an invasion indeed. And this administration does absolutely nothing to stop them.

They’re coming from prisons. They’re coming from jails. They’re coming from mental institutions and insane asylums. I — you know, the press is always on me because I say this. Has anyone seen Silence of the Lambs? The late great Hannibal Lecter, he’d love to have you for dinner. That’s insane asylums. They’re emptying out their insane asylums. And terrorists are coming in at numbers that we’ve never seen before. Bad things are going to happen. …

That’s why, to keep our families safe, the Republican platform promises to launch the largest deportation operation in the history of our country.

AMY GOODMAN: Donald Trump was introduced by Dana White, chief executive of UFC, Ultimate Fighting Championship. The evening also featured musician Kid Rock and the wrestling legend Hulk Hogan.

HULK HOGAN: But what happened last week, when they took a shot at my hero and they tried to kill the next president of the United States, enough was enough! And I said, “Let Trumpamania run wild, brother! Let Trumpamania rule again! Let Trumpamania make America great again!”

AMY GOODMAN: Hulk Hogan’s appearance at the RNC may surprise many, but he actually has something in common with Trump’s running mate, J.D. Vance. Both have ties to the right-wing billionaire tech investor Peter Thiel. Thiel reportedly spent as much as $10 million to help Hulk Hogan sue the website Gawker.com. The successful lawsuit brought down the website. Thiel also spent $10 million to help J.D. Vance get elected to the Senate in 2022.

To talk more about Donald Trump and the state of the Republican Party, we’re joined by two guests.

Benjamin Wallace-Wells is with us. He’s a staff writer at The New Yorker. His most recent piece is headlined “The Rise of the New Right at the Republican National Convention.” He’s joining us here in Milwaukee, just after the conclusion of the Republican National Convention.

And Maria Hinojosa is with us, the Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist and founder of Futuro Media. She is the host of Latino USA, joining us from New York.

We welcome you both to Democracy Now! We’re going to begin with Maria. What is stunning, and it’s not just last night, Thursday night, when President Trump, the former president, hoping he’ll be not only 45 but 47 — which was on everyone’s baseball caps — it was not only his longest speech in convention history, but in almost all of the references of speakers throughout the week, if there was a theme, it was attacking immigrants every which way — as murderers, as drug dealers, the assault, the invasion from the border. Can you talk, overall — you were just in Milwaukee — about the significance of what has just taken place here?

MARIA HINOJOSA: My god, Amy. You know, if I let it actually get into my heart, I would want to start crying, which I’m not going to do because I’m a seasoned journalist. But when you kind of lay it out that way, Amy, that’s the reason why I wasn’t tuning in every night, because it is all — and I’m sorry to say — but it is lies. Right? That’s ultimately what we’re talking about here.

What we do know is that the Republican platform under Donald Trump is very clear. It is, over and over and over, about attacking immigrants, refugees, migrants and travelers. What we don’t have on the other side, in terms of the Democratic Party, is a response to that, right? There isn’t a response to “build the wall,” which is precisely what we need.

In the case of the Republican National Convention, you know, having been in Milwaukee — which, by the way, is a hugely immigrant city. Milwaukee — I don’t know you, you probably haven’t had the opportunity — has an extraordinary street food culture of tacos, very particularly tacos. They love their tacos in Milwaukee. And so, this notion that you have a Republican convention in a city that has a huge immigration population, undocumented and documented, but somehow everybody’s safe in Milwaukee, it does not jibe with the narrative, the constant narrative of what Donald Trump says about who we are.

And again, Amy, what we know — it’s not me. Of course, I travel across the country. I’m at the border. I talk to immigrants and refugees every single day of my life. But we know what the Justice Department has said. We know what the FBI has said, that crime over the past three decades has decreased by 49% in the United States. And meanwhile, what the Congressional Budget Office has said is that immigration and immigrants are going to grow the American economy by $7 trillion over the next decade. You cannot have it both ways.

The role of the journalist is to not repeat the lies of an authoritarian. That’s why what’s happened at this Republican National Convention is so problematic for me as a journalist, because we cannot be the ones who are repeating these claims and then not doing the work of constantly doing the fact-checking. It’s impossible to do, with a convention that we have now seen is, essentially, specifically on the question of immigration, lying over and over and over again.

It’s — again, I’m sorry I got emotional. I hate when that happens. But when you kind of hear it one by one by one — and I’m just like, “Where do I live? What country do I live in?” Because if everything that he said is true, then our American economy would be tanking, right? And, actually, there would be rampant crime across the streets. That is not the truth. And even Trump supporters can say that, because if they just open their eyes, they know that’s not the truth.

NERMEEN SHAIKH: And, Maria, could you explain what you think the effects of and the influence of J.D. Vance, the selection that Trump made as his running mate, his vice president?

MARIA HINOJOSA: Well, I actually think — I actually think it’s a really smart choice. I’m trying to understand J.D. Vance’s motivations behind his decision to push to become Trump’s vice president, considering that he was a Never Trumper for a chunk of his earlier political career. I think he is an attractive person. You know, when people talk about, you know, once Trump dies, what’s going to happen with the MAGA movement, actually, you can see it following under someone like J.D. Vance. So, it’s a good choice if you believe in that entire rhetoric.

The problem with J.D. Vance is that he’s been on the record so many times, right? And the record does not forget when you say things about Donald Trump and how much you can’t stand him and how much he’s a problem for the country and how you don’t trust him and how, on the question of immigration, he’s wrong. And then, now you have J.D. Vance fawning over Donald Trump. So, there’s definitely some interest on his part. And, of course, I would love to speak with his wife, who is an immigrant, to understand just how she’s putting this all together.

NERMEEN SHAIKH: So, Benjamin, could you talk about —

AMY GOODMAN: His wife’s parents are immigrants.

MARIA HINOJOSA: Thank you for the correction.

NERMEEN SHAIKH: Ben, if you could talk about the — your reflections on the convention last night? You also covered the 2016 convention.

BENJAMIN WALLACE–WELLS: Yes.

NERMEEN SHAIKH: And you were there last night when Trump — you were on the convention floor when Trump gave his over-90-minute speech. Your response?

BENJAMIN WALLACE–WELLS: Well, it was a very interesting turn. The first three or four days of the convention were pitched as a display of unity, you know, and, to a degree, normality. You know, in 2016, there had been tremendous protests, counterprotests, both outside of the hall from activists who opposed Trump, but also inside of it from delegates and other candidates. You know, Ted Cruz famously gave a speech in which he declined to endorse Trump. And it was really a very contested and tense, menacing sort of event. This was supposed to be the smooth, you know, made-for-TV, everybody’s-on-the-same-team Republican Party. And for a while, for a while, for the first two, two-and-a-half days, it kind of looked that way. You know, there wasn’t so much difference between the MAGA wing of the party and the traditional Republican small-government conservative wing. People seemed to accept J.D. Vance, who had been seen previously as maybe a little bit of a populist insurgent, as, you know, Trump’s heir and a central part of this movement.

I think last night threw a lot of that into question. Trump was just straightforwardly weird. You know, he began with this kind of odd but interesting account of his shooting — I mean, just a horrifying event and, you know, in some ways, sort of historic to get a first-person account of it. But he went on for another hour. He, you know, had no clear message to deliver. He was supposed to be talking to swing voters. He didn’t offer them very much. And so, you know, there’s a way in which the whole party seemed to set up this convention as a way to declare, “We’re done with 2016. We’re done with all of that internal and external conflict. We’re about to win a big victory,” they thought, you know. And Trump sort of got in the way.

AMY GOODMAN: I want to stick with Peter Thiel. You know, at the beginning of this, we talked about Hulk Hogan’s appearance. You have Hulk Hogan. You have Kid Rock grabbing his crotch. You know, you have [UFC] — right? — the head, Dana White, introducing Trump. And he talked about how important that was. But what isn’t so obvious, as we said, this whole issue of Peter Thiel’s connection, the billionaire’s connection to Hulk Hogan, that he is the right-wing billionaire who reportedly spent as much as $10 million to help Hulk Hogan sue the website Gawker.com, ultimately taking down the website. That was the same amount of money that Thiel spent to help get Vance elected to the Senate in 2022. Talk about who Peter Thiel is and why this matters.

BENJAMIN WALLACE–WELLS: It’s a really important question, and I think, you know, the money in Silicon Valley and sort of this kind of dissident right money in Silicon Valley is moving through a lot right now, including at this event, this convention.

You know, Thiel is a billionaire. He was one of the founders of PayPal and then one of the most influential investors in other technology companies in Silicon Valley. He’s, you know, quite right-wing. He came from a sort of libertarian politics. And, you know, in 2016, he spoke at the Republican National Convention, and his support of Trump was, at the time, crucial to grounding him as sort of, you know, not just a TV star or an extremist, but somebody who had support within the business community.

You know, Vance’s career, I think, would not be possible without Peter Thiel. That $10 million in the 2022 Senate election pushed —

AMY GOODMAN: In Ohio.

BENJAMIN WALLACE–WELLS: In Ohio — pushed him up into a — to make him a sort of legitimate candidate, at a time when the Republican establishment in Ohio, though there wasn’t one particular candidate it was behind, didn’t know him very well and wasn’t backing him.

I think it’s important to dwell not just on Thiel here, but on the question of sort of Silicon Valley money. Elon Musk this week pledged $45 million a month to support a Trump super PAC from here until the election.

AMY GOODMAN: So, we’re talking almost $200 million.

BENJAMIN WALLACE–WELLS: Just an — a fifth of what the whole 2016 campaign for Trump cost. You know, just an astonishing amount of money. And up until fairly recently, one of the big dramas around Trump’s campaign was whether he could actually raise any money. Donors had backed away from him, you know, in part because of his many trials and the questions about whether he’d continue through the election. And so, you know, this is a situation where you have a relatively few people who have been able to sort of bail out both of the men at the top of the Republican ticket.

AMY GOODMAN: On Peter Thiel, people talk about in some of his crazier other ideas. What are those ideas?

BENJAMIN WALLACE–WELLS: You know, this is a little bit outside of my immediate memory, so I don’t know how much I can give you here. But he has, you know, talked in very sort of sweeping terms about his pessimism that American society as a democracy can continue to exist. He’s promoted seasteading and, you know, other efforts to build alternate colonies. It gets into pretty weird stuff pretty quickly.

AMY GOODMAN: I wanted to go back to Maria Hinojosa, the Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist, joining us from Bethlehem, Connecticut, though she was recently here in Milwaukee. About J.D. Vance, this quote — you know, you talked about him being a Never Trumper and then becoming a — I don’t know if it’s a Forever Trumper or at least a Trumper for Now, now the vice-presidential nominee. You have his comments back in 2016, where J.D. Vance said, “Trump makes people I care about afraid. Immigrants, Muslims, etc. Because of this, I find him reprehensible. God wants better of us,” Vance wrote. Maria?

MARIA HINOJOSA: Right. And that is on the record, so you can’t walk away from that, J.D. Vance. Again, it’s almost as if J.D. Vance —

AMY GOODMAN: What is — by the way, I should say — Maria, what I should say, when we ask all about, you know, the fact that he called Trump “America’s Hitler,” etc., I’m asking senators about this, I’m asking delegates about this. What did, for example, Ron Johnson say, the Wisconsin senator, when I said, “What do you say, that he says ’America’s Hitler’?” There is a talking point on this: “Then he met him.” That’s what they say. He changed.

MARIA HINOJOSA: Right. But, actually, what I was going to say is the opposite of that, that it wasn’t that moment when he met him, but, rather, that J.D. Vance began to believe all of the mis- and disinformation that has been repeated over and over and over by this candidate and the party, and that he somehow — because, Amy, the biggest problem that I have with this moment in our country is the disconnect between what we are being told by Trump and the Republican Party and MAGA versus what is real life. Yes, there is no denying that inflation is a real issue. No doubt. But when he talks about the question of immigration and crime and the economy and the stealing of jobs, you know, it’s just not jibing with what we see.

You’re right: I am in Bethlehem, Connecticut. It’s actually — where I am right now is a red part of the state. And what I see in my little community — right? — are people who have never been to the border, never very much interacted with anyone who speaks Spanish, let’s just say. But we are here, immigrants, in this community, in Bethlehem. We are working. You can see us, actually, through the diner, that doesn’t have a wall, where you can actually see who’s cooking and cleaning. So, they’re actually here. You see them. They’re making your food. They’re cleaning your lawns. They’re in the hospitals, you know, as clinicians, as doctors, etc. This does not jibe with the rhetoric of our country is being overwhelmed by a criminal immigrant element.

So, that is where J.D. Vance, you know, who once was considered something of an ally to immigrants because of the way he spoke, because of this kind of Midwest kind of certainty about the presence of immigrants and refugees, now goes in complete opposition to what he was saying before.

The problem, Amy, is that you and I are New Yorkers, right? We have been in New York for decades. And so, the notion of Donald Trump is actually — I mean, again, I hate to say this, but we all know that he’s a con man. You understand this as a New Yorker. He’s the guy who’s doing the three-card monte. And so, what we have to understand is that the rest of the country actually falls for the three-card monte, as many of them do when they come to New York. And they’re just like, “Wait, what just happened? I lost 20 bucks.” It’s like, yeah, you have to have your wits about you.

So, for me, again, it’s a smart choice, actually, for J.D. Vance. And I think you’re exactly right. He’s a For Now Trumper. I don’t know about the Forever Trumper, but he is absolutely a good continuation for what Donald Trump has started. Where he will go, who knows? Maybe that’s his play. I have a hard time kind of believing that. But nonetheless, I still think it was a smart choice.

NERMEEN SHAIKH: Maria, let’s just go to some of the claims that Trump made last night. You have, unlike most, direct knowledge of what the situation is at the border, having been several times in the last four months. So, if you could explain what you saw, as against the things that Trump said, and then also explain how Trump’s policies, what he’s proposing now, are different or similar to what he pursued in his first term?

MARIA HINOJOSA: Well, so, I just got back. I was only there once in the last four months. And we were on the border just south of Tucson, in the Tucson sector, at a place called Sasabe.

I mean, the important thing for people to know — and I know they’re kind of like, “Wait, what is” — where we were, it was 21 miles of wall with 19 openings. And you’re like, “Wait, what did she just say?” So, this “wall” that Trump built — and, of course, as you know, it was Bill Clinton who started the wall, just to be clear. This was not a Trump wall that he built. He made reparations. He increased the height from 15 feet to 30 feet, which is actually very important, because when you go up to 30 feet, if you’re trying to climb the wall, that’s at the point where you develop vertigo. So the number of traumatic brain injuries from people actually trying to climb now a 30-foot wall has increased by pretty extraordinary percentages. But you have these openings through the wall. It doesn’t make sense. That’s why I’m trying to explain to people. They’re like, “Wait, wait. There’s a wall, 21 miles, but you have 19 openings.” Therefore, if you are a migrant or a refugee, you’re getting a mixed message. And as the Border Patrol told me when we were there, this is but a speed bump. It does not keep people out.

So, when I was there, on the day that I was there, in the height of the invasion, I saw three people? Two people. Two people who actually crossed across the wall and then knelt — they were kneeling down and praying once they had gotten onto the U.S. side of the wall. They were not running from the Border Patrol. They were not escaping. They were not carrying drugs or weapons or anything. They were praying. And they were transported by good Samaritans to a now-makeshift refugee camp that exists on the U.S. side of the border, where migrants and refugees will wait for the Border Patrol to come to pick them up.

So, the reality of the border has changed, yes, because people understand you can no longer run from the Border Patrol. You know, actually, the Border Patrol is going to try to disperse you. Usually, you get injured when that happens. And so, now you cross, and you just sit down. It’s kind of like this peaceful protest, of nonviolent protest, of just like, “I’m just going to sit and wait.” So, this goes completely differently to what we are being told is happening on the border.

And why are there large numbers of people when they do come is because of Title 42 and precisely the “Remain in Mexico” policy, which force people to stay. So, this country’s policies created that stopgap. There are always people coming and going. And again, if it was true, what Donald Trump says, that immigrants are destroying the American economy, then we would not have factual information that says the American economy is growing, right? So we have to put that into perspective.

Now, what Donald Trump is saying about the greatest mass deportation ever seen in American history, what does that look like? You know, we’ve already lived through this. We lived through this, actually, during the middle of the George W. Bush administration, which was the uptick, post-9/11, of the immigration-detention-and-deportation-mass-industrial complex, starts around 2003, 2004. We see it increase with Barack Obama — his biggest mistake, that he should apologize for, because if he had done immigration reform, we would not be in this position with Donald Trump. So, I’m sorry, Barack Obama, but you need to accept responsibility for that reality. It increases under Donald Trump, to a point where, yeah, it’s about taking children away from parents. So, that is where we have gone. It’s not just building the wall. It’s that we’re going to take children away from parents. So, I think it is going to be — it’s going to be an attempt to do this on steroids.

Let me just finish by saying more money is spent on immigration detention and deportation in terms of law enforcement than all federal law enforcement agencies combined. And the Border Patrol is the largest law enforcement agency in the country. So we are facing a reality where people are like, “Oh, it’s just going to affect immigrants.” No. And I say this: If you are an American citizen of any sort, you’re going to need to figure out how you’re going to show your papers to a Border Patrol agent, because it can happen. That’s kind of where we’re going. I think people are like, “Oh, it’s just never going to touch me. It’s just them.” It will touch you.

NERMEEN SHAIKH: Well, I want to bring into this conversation, in Cleveland, Ohio, the home state of Trump’s vice-presidential running mate, J.D. Vance, Nina Turner, former Ohio state senator. She’s a senior fellow at the Institute on Race, Power and Political Economy. She was a national surrogate for Bernie Sanders in 2016 and the national co-chair of his 2020 presidential campaign.

Nina Turner, welcome back to Democracy Now! If you could begin by responding to Trump’s speech at the Republican National Convention last night?

NINA TURNER: Well, it was really Trump being Trump, his bluster. The way he — I mean, there was not a whole lot of vision there. It was him complaining, as he does, and taking credit for “every wonderful thing” — I put that in air quotes — that has ever happened in America, and blaming every terrible thing on the Democrats. No surprise that he walked his crowd through minute by minute almost of the assassination attempt, to get his crowd riled up. So, it was Trump in rare form, doing what he does, which is to be able to be a faux populist, lying through his teeth in terms of his exaggerations. And quite frankly, any of the working-class people in that crowd should be afraid. They should be very afraid.

AMY GOODMAN: I wanted to play for you, state Senator — former state Senator Turner, a part of J.D. Vance’s speech Wednesday night at the RNC.

SEN. J.D. VANCE: Now, my work taught me that there is still so much talent and grit in the American heartland. There really is. But for these places to thrive, my friends, we need a leader who fights for the people who built this country. We need a leader who’s not in the pocket of big business but answers to the workingman, union and nonunion alike, a leader who won’t sell out to multinational corporations but will stand up for American companies and American industry, a leader who rejects Joe Biden and Kamala Harris’s Green New Scam and fights to bring back our great American factories. We need President Donald J. Trump.

AMY GOODMAN: So, that was J.D. Vance on Wednesday night. Nina Turner, if you can talk about everything from the — what they’re calling now, and it’s a buzzword here — “Green New Scam,” instead of the “Green New Deal”? He was talking about the Teamsters president, Sean O’Brien, addressing the Republican convention. Last night, President Trump wasn’t naming many names, but he definitely named Shawn Fain’s name, the head of the UAW, attacking him viciously. If you can explain the significance of what both J.D. Vance and Trump are getting at?

NINA TURNER: Yeah, President Trump is picking the wrong fight with President Shawn Fain. As we know, the Summer of Solidarity was a spectacular success. President Fain and other unions are calling for a national strike to happen in 2028. And I hope that that is the case, where workers from all backgrounds, all walks of life unite in solidarity to push back against the billionaire class and the corporate interests in this country that don’t want to see working-class people live a good life.

Now, J.D. Vance, Amy, in some of that speech, I was shaking my head. Yeah, we do need a president that will put the working-class people ahead of corporations. We do need a president that will line up the supposed values of this countries with policy. The problem is, President Donald J. Trump is not it, and neither is J.D. Vance.

I’m old enough to remember when he came to — J.D. Vance — the “he” being J.D. Vance — went to the picket line of one of the UAW sites here in Ohio and was greeted by Congresswoman — none other than Congresswoman Marcy Kaptur, and she quipped at him, “Is this your first time here?” And he nervously shook his head, yeah, it was his first time here. She exposed him, in very few words, that he came to that picket line for show. He did not come to that picket line to stand in solidarity with working-class people, particularly those of the UAW.

And then we see that President Donald J. Trump is slamming the UAW. I want him to know — and he has to know this — that President Shawn Fain is a street fighter. So, I can’t wait to see how this unfolds. The UAW is already out on social media making it very clear that President Donald J. Trump is a — he’s a scab, that he will not stand up for working-class people.

AMY GOODMAN: Ben Wallace-Wells, we can’t finish this conversation without talking about what’s happening outside the Republican National Convention, and that’s on the Democratic side.

BENJAMIN WALLACE–WELLS: Yes.

AMY GOODMAN: This latest news of, you know, President Biden now has COVID. He’s in isolation. Enormous pressure from the centrist Democrats and many others — although the progressive Squad and Bernie Sanders have still embraced him — saying he’s got to pull out of the race.

BENJAMIN WALLACE–WELLS: Yes, not only that, but he’s been struggling to raise any money at all right now. I think when we look at what happened in the Republican convention — and some of your viewers may be thinking, you know, “How is this going unchecked?” You know, the reason it’s going unchecked is that Biden has been in such decline. He has been unable to prosecute a case against the Republicans, against what’s happening in the convention, for a while. And some of that is because he is, you know, caught up in this drama over his own campaign and whether it will survive. But some of it is also because he just lacks the energy and political coherence that he had even a few months ago.

And so, all of this, you know, all of these dynamics that we’re talking about around the convention, around its anti-immigrant aggression, around the populism, the natural counterpoint to that should be an aggressive Democratic pushback. Right now we’re not getting it. And that is why there’s such a strong push from the Democratic Party, from many, many in the Democratic Party, to convince Biden to step down.

NERMEEN SHAIKH: And very quickly, just to go back to the Republicans and what they were saying, your recent piece is “The Rise of the New Right” —

BENJAMIN WALLACE–WELLS: Yeah.

NERMEEN SHAIKH: — “at the Republican National Convention.” All of the issues we’ve been discussing, if you could just put them in the context of this wider ideology that’s being formed?

BENJAMIN WALLACE–WELLS: I think it’s a retreat to nationalism, is the big theme, you know. And there are strains in it that are more libertarian. There are strains that are more protectionist. But in policy towards immigrants, in policy towards — in foreign policy and trade policy, the big theme is a kind of theorizing of Trumpism and a retreat to nationalism.

AMY GOODMAN: We want to thank you all for being with us. Benjamin Wallace-Wells writes for The New Yorker magazine. Nina Turner is a former Ohio state senator. And we have been joined by Maria Hinojosa, the Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist.

Next up, protesters marched in Milwaukee to call for justice for two Black men who have just been killed in the last two weeks, Samuel Sharpe and D’Vontaye Mitchell. Back in 20 seconds.