This Trump campaign post revives a racist American tradition

In an effort to boost its election hopes, Donald Trump’s presidential campaign is drawing on the U.S.’s disturbing history of explicitly racist and xenophobic imagery. 

On Tuesday, the “Trump War Room” account on X, which is run by the campaign, shared an unabashedly racist image that suggested if Kamala Harris is elected president, American neighborhoods will be overrun with hordes of Black people and immigrants. 

“Import the third world/become the third world,” the post read, contrasting an image of a serene suburban neighborhood (in which no people are visible) with a photo depicting a huddled mass of mostly Black men crowded together on a city sidewalk. The essence of this post — that Black people, perhaps Black immigrants in particular, ought to be feared and rejected — is so grotesque and old-timey in its racism that it harks back to an era when such imagery was commonplace in mainstream American politics: the Jim Crow era. 

In fact, whether it’s this post, the signs at Trump rallies (and the national convention!) calling for “Mass Deportation Now” or cartoons shared by Trump and his followers that depict Black people with darkened skin and nonhuman features, the Trump campaign is reviving the ugly American tradition of deploying unmistakably racist and xenophobic imagery as part of its political vocabulary — the type of stuff one might expect to see in the Ku Klux Klan’s Fiery Cross newspaper more than a half-century ago. 

Here, for example, is a cartoon published in the Fiery Cross that depicted immigrants as “trash” and “undesirables.” That’s not so dissimilar to the message sent by the Trump campaign’s “third world” post or Trump’s rhetoric about immigrants’ being “vermin.” And here’s another cartoon published in that same newspaper, depicting Uncle Sam slamming the door shut on immigrants. “Whose country is this anyway?” the caption reads.

The KKK’s motto at the time it was sharing these images was literally “America First,” a phrase Trump and his followers have adopted as their own and used throughout his political career. Another ad from the pro-segregation Mothers’ League of Central High School in the 1950s called on voters to reject the historic push to desegregate the school in Little Rock, Arkansas, and support segregationists. “If the integrationists win this school board fight, the schools will be integrated this fall. There will be absolutely nothing you or we can do to stop it,” the flier warns. “DO YOU WANT NEGROES IN OUR SCHOOLS?” 

The Trump War Room post on Tuesday is stoking those same bigoted fears about changing neighborhoods, fears that have never truly gone away, with imagery and rhetoric that are just as blatant as they were a hundred years ago.