During the 2024 campaign, I became addicted to watching Trump rallies streamed on YouTube. Perhaps it was because, at a time when everything in my life felt uncertain, the rallies were always perfectly predictable. Praise would be dispensed to the “front row Joes” by the stage, and hostility directed to the “fake news” at the back. And there always came a point, or several, when Trump asserted that the countries of the world were emptying their prisons and mental institutions into the United States, that the only good thing about this was that these criminals “made our criminals look good,” and that cities around the world were now safe because all their criminals had gone to the United States. This would be followed by one or two maudlin, grisly accounts of “Biden migrant crime.”
Trump espouses a very specific kind of nativism, one that appears extreme but is ideologically safer than other forms. The focus is almost entirely on crime and “terrorism.” Sometimes on the campaign trail, Trump would gesture at the labor grievances that have historically been foundational to American nativism. But these remarks were always brief and awkward compared to the rhythmic, well-rehearsed diatribes about prisons and asylums.