Trump's MADA: Make America Delusional Again

Since 2015, when Trump announced his candidacy for president, I've been on a journey towards increasing pessimism. 

I remember in the early days when I'd read what his supporters were writing/saying and my internal optimist would tell me that, when reality set in, they'd learn at least a bit about the error of their ways. It never happened. 

I also watched as Trump's sexism, racism, cruelty, and narcissism were put right out there in the open - constantly thinking that his latest outrage (ie, "grab 'em by the p*ssy) would finally lead to his demise. It never happened. 

We just watched Trump close out his 2024 campaign by promising to take revenge against the "enemies within," parrot Hitler by referring to immigrants as "vermin" who are "poisoning the blood" of our country, and promising to be a dictator on day one. As an added bonus, he talked about Arnold Palmer's penis and pretended to perform fellatio on a microphone. I assumed that he'd lose support. It didn't happen.

So now we're preparing for Trump's return to the White House with his determination to wreck the economy via mass deportation and tariffs. If, as everyone suggests, his re-election was all about "the price of eggs is too high," we're tempted to believe that soaring inflation and a recession (or depression) will surely turn his supporters against him. Right?

Not so fast. The first check on that is to remind ourselves that the Covid pandemic surged during Trump's presidency and we experienced the worst recession of our lifetimes. Not only did we all feel the economic pain, millions of people died because he totally bungled this country's response. What did his supporters do? They blamed China, Fauci, and science. Then they went on to blame Biden as he successfully cleaned up Trump's mess. 

To understand how that happens, it is helpful to remember what Julian Sanchez wrote about epistemic closure on the right. He noted that when he injected that phrase into our political discourse, a lot of people thought he was simply talking about an echo chamber or closed mindedness. But it's more complex than that.

So an “echo chamber” just means you never hear any contrary information. The idea of “epistemic closure” was that you WOULD hear new and contrary information, but you have mechanisms in your belief system that reject anything that might force you to update your beliefs…

I bring this up now, because the Trump ecosystem has developed a pretty sophisticated set of epistemic closure mechanisms that work to reject new information that might otherwise pose a problem.

The closure mechanisms Trump set up to inoculate his followers include his references to things like the deep state, fake news, and the swamp. When fact-checkers expose Trump’s lies, it is just fake news. When former administration officials decry the president, they are part of the deep state. 

Trump's narcissistic personality disorder has led him to develop a delusional system for dealing with the realitiy of his failures. As I noted shortly after he took office in 2017, it can be summarized as "lie, distract, and blame." We need look no further than his Big Lie after the 2020 election as an example. He lied about voter fraud, distracted with references to the great replacement theory, and blamed Democrats. 

The problem that we all face now is that a large portion of the electorate has bought into Trump's personality disorder. They have adopted his set of epistemic closer mechanisms to shut off the reality of his failures. To put an exclamation point on that, let's remember than one of Trump's most effective strategies during the 2024 campaign was to ask people whether they're better off today than they were 4 years ago when refrigerated trucks were being used as morgues and lines for food banks were miles long. Astoundingly, too many voters said "no." That is delusion created by epistemic closure. 

What we're going to have to grapple with is that, when Trump tanks the economy this time around, he will once again roll out his lie, distract, and blame strategy. Since I don't suffer from narcissistic personality disorder, it's hard for me to forecast what that will look like. But I have no doubt that it will happen. My concern is that his supporters will believe him and rather than holding him accountable, they'll unleash more hate on those the president choses to blame. 

With all my heart I hope I'm wrong. But for almost 10 years now I've been learning the hard way that the one time Trump told the truth was when he said he could shoot someone on 5th Avenue and his supporters wouldn't abandon him.

None of this is meant to suggest capitulation to the very real danger Trump poses. It's just that we have to start by understanding what we're dealing with.

Rep. Ocasio-Cortez is right about Tulsi Gabbard

Since Donald trump nominated Tulsi Gabbard to be head of our intelligence services, many people have spoken up about how she consistently parrots Putin's talking points - which poses the question about whether or not the next president is turning over our intelligence services to a Russian asset. It is hard to overstate what a danger that poses to this country and our allies.

But Gabbard has attempted to sell herself as anti-war - which is a lie. Representative Ocasio-Cortez recently pointed that out when she told Joy Reid that "A Tulsi Gabbard nomination is a pro-war nomination globally. Point blank, period." 

Let's unpack that a bit.

Folks have been reminding us that, in 2017, Gabbard travelled to Syria to meet privately with Bashar al-Assad, after he had gassed his own citizens as part of the civil war in that country. But we need to dig a little deeper.

The civil war in Syria began when citizens of the country rebelled against the dictatorship of Assad as part of the Arab Spring in 2011. More than any other Arab country, Assad responded with horrific violence against the rebels. But by 2015, he was losing territory. That's when Putin intervened and started a bombing campaign in Syria.

Putin attempted to justify his actions by saying that he was fighting terrorists in Syria. But that was a lie. He was bombing civilians in an attempt to shore up the dictatorship of Assad. Long before Russia committed war crimes in Ukraine, they were bombing hospitals, schools, and markets in Syria. The atrocities were so severe that the UN took the unprecedented step of releasing a report charging Russia with war crimes.

What was Gabbard's response? As the bombing began, she suggested that the U.S. should be joining Russia in bombing Syrian civilians -  utilizing Putin's propaganda to suggest that the civil war in that country was all about terrorism.

Al-Qaeda attacked us on 9/11 and must be defeated. Obama won’t bomb them in Syria. Putin did. #neverforget911

— Tulsi Gabbard 🌺 (@TulsiGabbard) October 1, 2015

— Tulsi Gabbard 🌺 (@TulsiGabbard) October 1, 2015

Then in 2016, Gabbard was one of only three lawmakers — and the only Democrat — to vote against a non-binding resolution calling out the Assad regime for war crimes and stating that the United States should support the establishment of an international tribunal to bring war criminals to justice.

Gabbard's affection for brutal dictators doesn't stop with Syria's Assad.

In 2015, two years after he orchestrated the worst mass killing of protesters in modern history, a smiling Gabbard appeared next to a grinning Sisi on a visit to Cairo, after which she praised him for showing “great courage and leadership” in the fight against “extreme Islamist ideology.”

In summary, when oppressed people stand up to protest against tyranny, Gabbard supports violence and civil war as the tool for dictators to maintain their power.

It's worth noting that the first time Russia invaded Ukraine it was in 2014 after the Maiden revolution got rid of Putin's stooge, Viktor Yanukovych. When that didn't bring the country to heel, he launched a full-scale invasion in 2022. On the very same day, Gabbard sent out a tweet blaming the invasion on Biden and NATO. In other words, Putin's actions were justified. Is it any wonder then, why Russian state television calls her their "girlfriend?" 

Sorting through the noise to try and understand what just happened

After sitting in my discomfort for a few days, I'm ready to try to understand WTH happened in this election. There are an awful lot of bad takes out there attempting to find fault with VP Harris, President Biden, or Democrats in general. But they're all impossible to square with the fact that, no matter their shortcomings, a little more than half of voters supported a delusional, narcissistic bully who has been convicted of 34 felonies, found liable for sexual assault, and tried to overturn an election.

So here's the take that makes the most sense to me: 

About a month ago I wrote that, when it came to the presidential election, it was all about the lies and the way Trump/Vance used them to create an alternative reality. As it turns out, the lies worked. One of the best ways to document that came from a Reuters/Ipsos poll that was conducted just prior to the election.

What we see is that the more voters believed Trump's lies about crime, the economy, and immigration, the more likely they were to vote for him. Those who believed the truth swung heavily in Harris's direction. 

We're also getting a lot of bad takes on who those lies appealed to. Philip Bump did a good job of debunking all of that nonsense. The first thing to note is that Trump received about the same number of votes that he did in 2020 (it's just that Harris got fewer than Biden). So if we look at the demographics of Trump voters, "his voting base [in 2024] was older, wealthier and about equally White to what it was in 2020."

For example, we're hearing a lot of talk about how Trump won over Hispanics and African Americans in 2024. But here's what that actually looked like:

To all of those who are suggesting that this election was all about populism and support from working class folks, the truth is that Trump's big gains were actually among the wealthy.

What this kind of information tells us is that we not only need to combat the lies from right wing media, we're also being fed a lot of junk information from mainstream media and pundits. So chose your sources wisely.

Over the last few days I've been noting who I will pay attention to and who I'm going to ignore. On the former category, I've been significantly impressed with Rebecca Solnit. Here are a few gems from her latest column at The Guardian. 

I’m wary about anger – as George Orwell once observed, it’s easily redirected, like the flame of a blowlamp, and it has been in this election as people whose own lives were thwarted economically and otherwise got on board with the scapegoating of immigrants. So it’s something to be careful with. Even so, “rage is a form of prayer too,” as Reverend Dr. Renita J. Weems declared after this terrible US election.

I suspect she means that behind that rage is care, and this is something I have found secular activists often forget – you are angry the children are being bombed or the forest is being cleared because you care about them, so it’s not the feelings about the forces of destruction that is primary. It’s the love, and not losing sight of that is crucial...

Not being them and not being like them is the first job, not just as negatives but as an embrace of the ideals of love, kindness, open-mindedness, the ability to engage with uncertainty and ambiguity, inclusiveness...

There are other kinds of resistance that mean making your own life and your own mind an independent republic in which the pursuit of truth, human rights, kindness and empathy, the preservation of history and memory...This does not overthrow the regime, but it does mean being someone who has not been conquered by it, and it invites others who have not been or who can throw off the shackles to join you...

We do not know what will happen. But we can know who we can commit to be in the face of what happens. That is a strong beginning. The fact that we cannot save everything does not mean we cannot save anything, and everything we can save is worth saving. Let Julian Aguon have the last word: “No offering is too small. No stone unneeded … All of us, without exception, are qualified to participate in the rescue of the world.”

Solnit's words remind me of a song Garth Brooks wrote after the Oklahoma bombing titled "The Change." It's going to be my anthem for a while.

I've also been extremely impressed with the analysis provided by historian Heather Cox Richardson. She was interviewed by Jon Stewart a couple of days ago on his podcast. It is a little over an hour long and I know most people won't take the time to listen to the whole thing. But she's absolutely brilliant (Stewart...not so much). So I definitely recommend paying attention to her - no one does a better job of describing what just happened. 

Doug Muder has always demonstrated a deep understanding of this political era and recently wrote a post titled, "My Way-Too-Soon Election Response" over at his blog The Weekly Sift.

Going forward, I'll be paying a lot of attention to Timothy Snyder, who literally wrote the book on fascism. His most recent column at the New Yorker is titled, "What Does it Mean that Donald Trump Is a Fascist."

To maintain my sanity in the midst of the chaos that is about to come, those are just a few of the people I'll be listening to. 

On a final (somewhat related) note, I'd just like to share this little nugget to help explain why Christian nationalists are so amenable to the alternate reality created by Trump's lies. 

The discomfort I'm sitting in today

I'm still reeling emotionally and doubt that it's a good time to write any analysis about what happened on Tuesday. There are an awful lot of bad takes pointing fingers - which is understandable, but ultimately not productive. Here's a twitter thread from Brad Bauman that I found helpful:

A lot of times we confuse fast with smart. Quick and simple answers at a moment when everyone is trying to make meaning of what’s happening and looking for something to do. We end up doing things that aren’t productive or counter productive when we move that quick.

Sometimes, the right answer is to sit in our pain; sit in our discomfort and feel it, rather than rush to answers or movement.

There will be a resistance, and all of us will be a part of it, individually and collectively.

Let’s take a moment and allow ourselves to process, to feel, to think about what truths arise and then let’s act.

As I "sit in my discomfort and feel it," Rebecca Solnit captured my reaction perfectly.

Our mistake was to think we lived in a better country than we do. Our mistake was to see the joy, the extraordinary balance between idealism and pragmatism, the energy, the generosity, the coalition-building of the Kamala Harris campaign and think that it must triumph over the politics of lies and resentment. Our mistake was to think that racism and misogyny were not as bad as they are, whether it applied to who was willing to vote for a supremely qualified Black woman or who was willing to vote for an adjudicated rapist and convicted criminal who admires Hitler. 

I literally cried as I read that. Here's how John Harwood put it:

If you’re accustomed, as I am, to believing that a critical mass of Americans embraces the values of freedom, pluralism, and common sense, the choice voters made defies comprehension. The arc of history in 2024 bent not toward justice, as Martin Luther King Jr. liked to say, but away from it.

Regular readers will know that I've always maintained that President Obama's speech at the 50th anniversary of the Selma march was the most important he's ever given. In it, he defined his view of America and the ideals we've embraced/fought for. VP Harris echoed that vision during her speech in Washington D.C. last week.

I’ve seen [the promise of America] in Americans, different in many respects, but united in our pursuit of freedom, our belief in fairness and decency and our faith in a better future...

Nearly 250 years ago, America was born when we wrested freedom from a petty tyrant. Across the generations, Americans have preserved that freedom, expanded it, and in so doing proved to the world that a government of, by, and for the people is strong and can endure. And those who came before us, the Patriots at Normandy and Selma, Seneca Falls, and Stonewall, on farmlands, and factory floors, they did not struggle, sacrifice and lay down their lives only to see us seed our fundamental freedoms.

They didn’t do that only to see us submit to the will of another petty tyrant.

These United States of America, we are not a vessel for the schemes of wannabe dictators. The United States of America is the greatest idea humanity ever devised, a nation big enough to encompass all our dreams, strong enough to withstand any fracture or fissure between us, and fearless enough to imagine a future of possibilities.

So America, let us reach for that future. Let us fight for this beautiful country we love.

And in 7 days, we have the power, each of you has the power to turn the page and start writing the next chapter in the most extraordinary story ever told.

What's been shattered is my belief in that America. More than anything else, I'm grieving that loss today.

Why I'm getting optimistic about this election

It's hard to over-state how much the Des Moines Register's Selzer poll shook things up by showing Harris/Walz leading in Iowa. None of us know if their numbers are on point. But here's what we DO know:

That's one of the ways to look at the Selzer poll. In early Sept, they had Trump up +4. By the end of Oct, they have Harris up +3. Since their methods didn't change, they captured something important. (2/2)

— Nancy LeTourneau 🇺🇦 (@Smartypants60) November 3, 2024

Whether or not Harris wins Iowa isn't as important as the fact that the same pollster found a 7 point swing in her favor in state that has been deeply red. WOW!

But let's forget about the polls for a minute. While Selzer gave us all a moment of hope, a consensus has been building over the last week or so that pollsters and aggregators really don't have a clue about what's going on. Here are the data points that make me optimistic.

Enthusiasm

According to Gallup, Democrats are seeing a surge in enthusiasm.

Democrats and Democratic-leaning independents are largely driving the surge in enthusiasm nationally. In March, 55% of Democrats and Democratic leaners said they were more enthusiastic than usual about voting; now, 78% are. Republicans and Republican leaners, who held a slight edge in enthusiasm in March, now trail Democrats by a significant margin, with their current 64% enthusiasm score up slightly from 59% in the spring.

That difference is palpable when you compare what is happening at Harris/Walz rallies to Trump's. 

Meanwhile here was Kamala’s rally, held at the exact coliseum. Both levels plus the floor full of eager supporters! https://t.co/ZJmaeIaIvg pic.twitter.com/w55RKfka1A

— V 🤎 (@veexoh_) November 3, 2024

Fundraising 

It's true that Trump has a lock on money from the oligarchs. The problem is that they only get one vote - like the rest of us. When it comes to small donors, they've abandoned his ship.

Donald Trump’s contributions from small-dollar donors have plummeted since his last bid for the White House...Fewer than a third of the Republican’s campaign contributions have come from donors who gave less than $200 — down from nearly half of all donations in his 2020 race...The total collected from small donors has also declined, according to the analysis. Trump raised $98 million from such contributors through June, a 40% drop compared to the $165 million they contributed during a corresponding period in his previous presidential race.

Here's how that compares to Harris/Walz:

Ground game

When it comes to GOTV, Trumpers are nowhere to be found.

Some battleground state Republicans say they’re worried they see little evidence of Donald Trump’s ground game — and fear it could cost him the election in an exceedingly close race.

In interviews, more than a dozen Republican strategists and operatives in presidential battlegrounds voiced serious concerns about what they described as a paltry get-out-the-vote effort by the Trump campaign, an untested strategy of leaning on outside groups to help do field work and a top-of-the-ticket strategy that’s disjointed from the one Republicans down the ballot are running.

In comparison, here's at taste of what the Democratic ground game looks like:

The Harris ground game strategy is at once obvious and sophisticated. Harris has more than 2,500 staff and 358 field offices across the battleground states, including more than 475 paid staffers in Pennsylvania. Since July, more than 110,000 people have volunteered with the Harris campaign in Pennsylvania, and those volunteers have knocked on nearly 2 million doors in October alone. One third of the Pennsylvania field offices are in rural counties that Trump carried by double digits in 2020, and where Harris’ goal is to hold down Trump’s margins. At the same time, the campaign is attempting to lock down the base in urban areas through long-term relational organizing targeted to hard-to-reach voters. The campaign realizes that Democrats have long taken Black and Latino votes for granted. Now, the campaign is treating them as persuasion targets as much as mobilization targets. And it believes the path to victory goes through the suburbs, where they hope college-educated voters and women could propel the VP to victory.

Harris/Walz voters are "fired up and ready to go!" Their enthusiasm is demonstrated by their willingness to donate both money and time to the campaign. So while I'm certainly not ready to celebrate yet, I'm at least starting to unclench my fists and breath a bit. 

 

It's the lies, stupid

For my title, I'm borrowing a phrase from when James Carville said, "It's the economy, stupid." That's because the Trump/Vance campaign is pretty much entirely based on lies. That hit home to me when CNN's Daniel Dale recently pointed out that Trump told at least 40 lies during two speeches this week. That is in line with how Dale categorized Trump's performance during his debate with Harris.

No major presidential candidate before Donald Trump has ever lied with this kind of frequency. A remarkably large chunk of what he said tonight was just not true, and this wasn’t like little exaggeration, political spin. A lot of his false claims were untethered to reality.

The most common lies told by Trump/Vance have to do with immigration. But they also tell blatant lies about the economy, tariffs, FEMA, crime, abortion, and schools. Those were all documented recently by David Corn, who makes an important point when he writes that Trump is running a disinformation campaign (emphasis mine).

Trump’s dishonesty goes further than the usual campaign lying. He concocts and promotes utterly false narratives to shape voters’ perceptions of fundamental realities. His campaign is a full-fledged project to pervert how Americans view the nation and the world, an extensive propaganda campaign designed to fire up fears and intensify anxieties...

Trump is not merely heading a campaign fueled by the routine lies of politics. He is endeavoring to use these and other lies to create an alternative reality for millions so they will vote on the basis of a false understanding of the world.

This is why it is so difficult (and perhaps pointless) to have conversations with MAGA people. It's not as if you can simply debunk a lie. It is that they are actually living in an alternate reality created by lies.

So what happens when Trump or Vance are confronted with the fact that they're lying? Trump just brushes it off as "fake news." But Vance has taken a different approach. For example, during the VP debate, Walz asked Vance a basic question: "Did [Trump] lose the 2020 election?" Here's how the senator from Ohio responded:

Tim, I'm focused on the future. Did Kamala Harris censor Americans from speaking their mind in the wake of the 2020 COVID situation?...

Obviously, Donald Trump and I think that there were problems in 2020. We've talked about it. I'm happy to talk about it further. But you guys attack us for not believing in democracy. The most sacred right under the United States democracy is the First Amendment. You yourself have said there's no First Amendment right to misinformation. Kamala Harris wants to use the power of government and big tech to silence people from speaking their minds. That is a threat to democracy that will long outlive this present political moment. I would like Democrats and Republicans to both reject censorship.

You can read a good fact check about what Walz said here. And Kamala Harris has never suggested that we should use the power of the government to silence people from speaking their minds.  

But it's important to note how Vance responded when challenged by Walz about the Big Lie. He pivoted to censorship. He did the same thing when challenged by Lulu Garcia-Navarro. 

What Vance is telling us is that he and Trump will lie in order to create an alternate reality. When challenged, he'll cry "censorship."  That's rich coming from the guy who wants the government to "seize the institutions of the left" and implement "a de-woke-ification program.” So no, Vance has zero respect for democracy or the First Amendment. He simply wants to lie with abandon. 

So what happens when politicians create an alternative reality based on lies. Here's what Peter Pomerantsev wrote back in 2014 in a piece titled "Russia and the Menace of Unreality: How Vladimir Putin is revolutionizing information warfare" (emphasis mine)

The new Russia doesn’t just deal in the petty disinformation, forgeries, lies, leaks, and cyber-sabotage usually associated with information warfare. It reinvents reality, creating mass hallucinations that then translate into political action... insisting on the lie, the Kremlin intimidates others by showing that it is in control of defining ‘reality.’ This is why it’s so important for Moscow to do away with truth. If nothing is true, then anything is possible.

 A place where nothing is true and anything is possible is ripe for totalitarianism, as Hannah Arendt warned.

What makes it possible for a totalitarian or any other dictatorship to rule is that people are not informed...If everybody always lies to you, the consequence is not that you believe the lies, but rather that nobody believes anything any longer.

 That is why Trump/Vance pose the biggest threat to democracy that we've seen in generations.

The story Vance doesn't want you to hear about towns like Springfield, Ohio

During an interview on CNN Sunday morning, J.D. Vance basically admitted that he created the lies about Haitian immigrants eating pets in Springfield, Ohio. 

Vance claims he and Trump have to "create stories" about migrants eating cats and dogs "so that the American media actually pays attention to the suffering of the American people."

There is then some awkward dead air as Bash tries to highlight the absurdity of what he just said pic.twitter.com/IN26ZGYsvE

— Aaron Rupar (@atrupar) September 15, 2024

The rationale he gives for spreading those lies is that he wanted the media to focus on what is going on in Springfield. What he doesn't want you to know is that several reporters have covered the story of towns like Springfield for over a decade. It's just that they have been doing so honestly - without the lies he's been ginning up. 

For example, back in 2011, A.G. Sulzberger wrote about what was happening in western Kansas. 

For generations, the story of the small rural town of the Great Plains, including the dusty tabletop landscape of western Kansas, has been one of exodus — of businesses closing, classrooms shrinking and, year after year, communities withering as fewer people arrive than leave and as fewer are born than are buried. That flight continues, but another demographic trend has breathed new life into the region.

Hispanics are arriving in numbers large enough to offset or even exceed the decline in the white population in many places. In the process, these new residents are reopening shuttered storefronts with Mexican groceries, filling the schools with children whose first language is Spanish and, for now at least, extending the lives of communities that seemed to be staggering toward the grave.

James Fallows visited the same area in 2016. 

Every single person we’ve met here — Anglo and Latino, African and Burmese and other, old and young, native-born and immigrant, male and female, well-educated and barely literate, working three jobs and retired and still in school—of all these people, we’ve asked the same questions. Namely: how has Kansas handled this shift in demography? And how does it sound, in this politically and culturally conservative part of the country, to hear the national discussion about “building a wall,” about making America “a real country again,” of the presumptive Republican nominee saying even today that Americans are “angry over borders, they’re angry over people coming into the country and taking over, nobody even knows who they are.”

And every single person we have spoken with — Anglo and Latino and other, old and young, native-born and immigrant, and so on down the list — every one of them has said: We need each other! There is work in this community that we all need to do. We can choose to embrace the world, or we can fade and die. And we choose to embrace it. (The unemployment rate in this area, by the way, is under 3 percent, and every business we’ve talked with has “help wanted” notices out.)

Dave Price wrote about Marshalltown, Iowa in 2016.

As many smaller Iowa towns are shrinking, Marshalltown is experiencing the opposite: The population has increased over the past 15 years, and it’s almost entirely due to an influx of immigrants. The number of non-Hispanic people in town has actually declined slightly since 2000, while Hispanics have more than doubled their share of the population in that time. They now make up more than a quarter of the city’s 28,000 residents.

Art Cullen, of Iowa’s Storm Lake Times, wrote about the shrinking population of small Iowa towns in 2019 and came to this conclusion.

[R]ural communities can be rejuvenated by immigration to replace those youth who don’t see their future in a food processing plant or dairy barn. First, a recognition of the crucial role immigrants play in low-margin industries like agriculture and food processing would be helpful. Second, a system that recognizes reality is overdue. The problem in Sac County is not too many Mexicans, but too few people in general, no matter their skin color.

Michelle Norris wrote about Hazelton, Pennsylvania in 2018.

Hazleton was another former coal mining town slipping into decline until a wave of Latinos arrived. It would not be an overstatement to say a tidal wave. In 2000 Hazleton’s 23,399 residents were 95 percent non-Hispanic white and less than 5 percent Latino. By 2016 Latinos became the majority, composing 52 percent of the population, while the white share plunged to 44 percent... 

Hazleton’s population is younger, the hospital is no longer in bankruptcy, and major employers such as Amazon, Cargill, and American Eagle Outfitters have opened distribution centers and plants offering jobs that helped attract the massive Latino migration.

 In 2019, Thomas Friedman visited Wilmar, Minnesota.

“We had 1,200 to 1,600 Somalis when I started as mayor in 2014 and now we have 3,500 to 3,800,” said [Mayor Marv] Calvin. “We also have 800 Karen people from Burma.” Add to that over 4,000 Latinos and you have a town of 21,000 that had been virtually all white and Christian its entire existence become nearly half new immigrants in the blink of two decades...

America is actually a checkerboard of towns and cities — some rising from the bottom up and others collapsing from the top down, ravaged by opioids, high unemployment among less-educated white males and a soaring suicide rate. I’ve been trying to understand why some communities rise and others fall — and so many of the answers can be found in Willmar.

The answers to three questions in particular make all the difference: 1) Is your town hungry for workers to fill open jobs? 2) Can your town embrace the new immigrants ready to do those jobs, immigrants who may come not just from Latin America, but also from nonwhite and non-Christian nations of Africa or Asia? And 3) Does your town have a critical mass of “leaders without authority”?

Almost all of these accounts describe the challenges these communities faced in light of the demographic changes they were experiencing. But what is true in every single case is that, prior to the influx of immigrants, these towns were dying. Now, if they can rise above the racism, they have a chance to flourish. 

That is the story David DeWitt tells about Springfield, Ohio.

The Times details how, after decades of shrinking and uncertainty, Springfield was able to attract new manufacturing and business with a strategic plan, and by 2020 had drawn in food-service firms, logistics companies, and a microchip maker, among others...

So what, in fact, do we have going on here?

We have a large population increase over a short period of time; we have a language barrier that can cause various strains; we have housing, schooling, and health services that need adequate resources to deal with a massive and rapid adjustment.

We also have an eager, dutiful, law-abiding, and peaceful workforce helping revitalize a city and helping local businesses thrive; we have a city’s population swelling instead of declining; we have an influx of new taxpayers and consumers filling blue-collar jobs, paying property taxes, shopping at local stores, and contributing to their community.

Are there struggles? Absolutely.

Is it chaos and terror? Absolutely not.

Let's first of all note that what is happening in all of these small towns started long before the Biden/Harris administration. There is a long history to these dynamics that Trump/Vance want to ignore. That's because they are more interested in fanning the flames of racism and inciting terror in towns like Springfield than they are in finding solutions to help them flourish. 

The truth is that small town America needs immigrants. 

Now run and tell that.