(Rancho Palos Verdes) “Barbaric criminals”, “murderers and terrorists”: Donald Trump redoubled his attacks on migrants on Friday, accusing his Democratic rival Kamala Harris of wanting to transform the United States into a “refugee camp”, in an increasingly tense campaign for the White House.
“America’s children are at the mercy of barbaric criminals,” the Republican presidential candidate said at a news conference at his golf resort in the suburbs of Los Angeles.
The former president, who has been issuing numerous diatribes, some of them false, against migrants all week, once again brought up the fallacious and racist claim that Haitian migrants steal dogs and cats to eat them in the city of Springfield.
“We are going to organize mass expulsions” in this small town in Ohio, promised the Republican billionaire, pretending to ignore that many of these migrants have a residence permit.
“Third World”
During his press conference, the Republican candidate accused, without proof, his rival in the November election of bringing in “some of the worst murderers and terrorists” illegally by plane.
“Kamala is going to turn America into a Third World refugee camp. It’s already happening to some extent,” he hammered home in a speech that was once again very disjointed.
The Republican candidate has placed immigration, a top concern among voters according to polls, at the heart of his new bid for the White House. Just as he did in 2016, when he campaigned on his proposed wall on the border with Mexico.
If he wins on November 5, he promises to fight illegal immigration with mass expulsions.
The tempestuous septuagenarian is due to take part in a rally in the western state of Nevada this evening, where the issue of immigration is expected to be discussed at length once again.
A radical right activist recently seen in her campaign entourage, Laura Loomer, for her part violently attacked Kamala Harris, whose mother is Indian, by writing recently on X that if the Democrat won, the White House would “smell of curry.”
Kamala Harris will be in the swing state on Friday, perhaps the most crucial state in the presidential election: Pennsylvania, with its 19 electors.
PHOTO DREW ANGERER, AGENCE FRANCE-PRESSE
Kamala Harris
Conspiracy theory
The vice president has so far not responded to her rival’s comments. When Donald Trump brought up the conspiracy theory about pets during their televised debate on Tuesday, she responded by shaking her head vehemently and looking half-amused, half-outraged.
This daughter of an Indian mother and a Jamaican father, the first female vice-president of the United States, has never engaged in attacks targeting her identity since the beginning of her campaign, conducted in a very methodical manner and with a resolutely centrist position.
On Thursday, the 59-year-old Democrat delivered her well-rehearsed speech in North Carolina, another pivotal state in the historic American South, on the Atlantic coast.
“It’s time to turn the page” on Trump, she hammered home, promising to defend the middle class and abortion rights.
Once again, Kamala Harris, who entered the race with a bang after President Joe Biden withdrew less than two months ago, insisted that the election would be “very close” and that she was “not the favorite.”
The candidate, who by all accounts dominated her opponent in Tuesday’s debate, will not be able to count on another confrontation of this type to give her momentum: Donald Trump was in fact opposed to a rematch on Thursday.
In an America that now seems irremediably politically divided, the two candidates are neck and neck in the polls.
As in 2016 and 2020, everything should therefore come down to a few tens of thousands of votes from undecided voters in six or seven strategic states, regardless of the total number of votes nationwide, since the election is taking place according to the principle of indirect universal suffrage.