Donald Trump's town hall with Latino voters shows his campaign is clueless

We have officially entered the manic stage of the presidential election, in which the candidates are suddenly everywhere. At least Kamala Harris is everywhere. She's holding huge raucous rallies all over the swing states, appearing on podcasts and mainstream interviews, and even going on Fox News and subjecting herself to a barrage of hostile Trump-inspired accusations from anchor Bret Baier, who didn't seem to want her to actually answer them. (Harris showed she could not be intimidated, which was probably the point of the interview in the first place.) Nobody at this point should complain that she isn't available to the public. Just turn on your TV and you'll see her there.

Donald Trump is as present as always, holding loony rallies and posting crazy comments on Truth Social. Yet he is refusing to debate Harris again and has canceled numerous scheduled interviews this week. According to Tara Palmieri at Puck, Mar-a-Lago insiders say this is all because Trump is so certain he's going to win that he's just letting his freak flag fly. The campaign figures that Trump's "self-assurance" will create a bandwagon effect as voters decide to go with the winner. Republicans do love the bandwagon-effect strategy, but Trump is seemingly off his rocker in a way that doesn't easily read as "confident," except to the extent he may believe that his "election integrity" plans will ensure that he "wins" even if he doesn't.

Trump did do some events this week, but it would be an awfully big leap to say he showed self-assurance. There was the now-notorious swaying-to-the-music town hall event, which I've written about already. That appearance was so bizarre that it actually managed to dominate the conversation for a couple of days, which really says something amid this frenzied news cycle.

Then he held a taped Fox News town hall with host Harris Faulkner, who sat him down with a group of allegedly undecided women. We know that a large majority of women voters in this country loathe Donald Trump. His campaign would like to mitigate that by allowing him to beguile a few women with his suave charm. The gathered Georgia women did seem rather weirdly ecstatic by his presence, but that's because they were all Republican party shills and ardent supporters brought in by Fox. It even turned out that Fox edited out one of the questions that gave away the scheme.

But Trump did one event this week that may turn out to be important, for reasons of actual substance. He appeared on the Spanish-language network Univision for a town hall with Latino voters. I think we all know what an important demographic this is, and we've heard that Trump is garnering a larger percentage of Hispanic men than ever before. I suspect he believed that it would, therefore, be an easy exchange like the one with the women plants the day before. So he wasn't prepared for the kind of questions he got.

A man named Ramiro González, who identified as a Republican, asked Trump why he should support him when people from his own administration, including former Vice President Mike Pence, refuse to do so. Gonzales pointed to Jan. 6 and Trump's COVID mismanagement as disturbing but wanted to give Trump a chance to win back his vote.

Trump replied that 97% of people in his former administration still support him. He then claimed that Jan. 6 was "a day of love." He lamented the police shooting of insurrectionist Ashli Babbitt before insisting that "nobody was killed" that day and then lumped himself in with the rioters while saying, "We didn't have guns. The others had guns but we didn't have guns." You can see from the look on González's face, and those of others in the audience, that they knew he was full of it.

González later said he would not be voting for Trump.

Trump has been charged with several felonies related to the Jan. 6 insurrection. He claims that he bears no responsibility for any of it. And yet here he said that "we" didn't have guns, but "the others" did, by which he can only mean the police. One imagines that special prosecutor Jack Smith will be looking at that footage with keen interest. (Needless to say, there were plenty of guns among the rioters. Many of the people Trump calls "hostages," and promises to pardon on day one, were charged with violent assaults against police officers.)

But there was another question that interested me most, because I've been dying to hear someone ask it for months. A 64-year-old man named Jorge Velázquez, who said he'd spent many years working with his hands, "hunched over picking strawberries and cutting broccoli," asked Trump who he thought would do that kind of work if he deported all the undocumented workers who account for most of the agricultural workforce, and how that would affect food prices.

Trump went into his usual rant about criminal immigrants, showing once again that he is completely clueless about how anything actually works. Trump seems to think they're taking the jobs away from American citizens, specifically "African Americans and Hispanics" who are suffering as a result. These are the "Black jobs" he was talking about.

Trump made a point of saying that he wants laborers (who love our country) to enter legally, which suggests he's talking about something like the old bracero program which was replaced by the issuance of H-2a and H-2b visas. The problem is that his agenda, as articulated in Project 2025, wants to discontinue temporary worker visas. His immigration guru, Stephen Miller, has made clear that he intends to drastically curtail legal immigration as well.

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Trump's grotesque xenophobic rhetoric, whether or not he fully understands it, is paving the way for the GOP's mainstream adoption of the Great Replacement theory, which holds that all foreigners from "s**thole countries" must be barred, not just because they are criminals or are taking all the "Black jobs" but because they are supposedly destroying the culture of America. When Trump reads Miller's screeds on the stump about immigrants "poisoning the blood" of America, there is no distinction between legal and illegal.

His new best friend, Elon Musk, is pushing the Great Replacement theory constantly, having signed on to the idea that Democrats are trying to import immigrants so they will vote for them, an old standby promoted by the likes of Ann Coulter in her book "Adios, America." One would think that with all the talk about Latinos voting in large numbers for Trump this time, his campaign might stop and think about whether deporting them is a good long-term strategy. But they're so hooked on the idea that migrants are marauding gangsters — who are also, inexplicably, highly motivated to vote for Democrats — that they aren't thinking clearly on the subject.

On a more material level, I have to wonder how everyone's going to like the prices at the grocery store when strawberries and broccoli are selling for 10 or 20 times what they cost today from the combination of labor shortages and tariffs on imported food. Trump may not ever eat vegetables but I'd guess that even Republicans like to eat a salad once in a while.

While I doubt that Trump's ever read a treatise on the Great Replacement theory, he's fully on board with it and we know that because he's recently promised to deport the Haitian immigrants in Springfield, Ohio, even though they are here legally, are working at jobs that others didn't want and profess to love America. He believes they're polluting the culture of Springfield and need to go back to where they came from. That's what this is all about. And that, my friends, is fascism with a capital F.