While the 2024 presidential race remains extremely close, voters have consistently given former President Donald Trump their strongest support on the issue of immigration and border security. A just-released ABC News/Ipsos poll showed Trump with a 10-point lead (46%-36%) when it came to who voters trusted most to handle immigration, a higher margin than on any other issue.
That matches a Wall Street Journal poll of swing state voters which found, according to Friday’s New York Post, “on ‘who is best able to handle’ illegal immigration — which voters say is their second-top concern — respondents give the ex-prez a 16-point lead (52% to 36%).”
Even among Latino voters — a bloc that is largely supporting Vice President Kamala Harris — an NBC News/Telemundo/CNBC poll found a strong plurality (47%) favored the former President’s policies to “secure the border and control immigration,” vs. only 34% who trusted Harris on this issue, an astounding 13-point margin.
Trump’s high approval on the issue is remarkable because, for the entire four years of his presidency, the media elite savaged his immigration policies as “cruel,” “evil,” “inhumane,” “torture,” “profoundly racist” and akin to the policies of Nazi Germany.
“Children are being marched away to showers, just like the Nazis said,” MSNBC’s Joe Scarborough wildly charged back in 2018. “The Statue of Liberty, I think, is weeping right now,” fretted CBS This Morning co-host Gayle King that same year.
Liberal journalists hammered this theme throughout Trump’s presidency, yet it seems the Biden administration’s abject incompetence on the issue turned out to be more persuasive than years of media rhetoric. Here are 25 quotes showing how the media have deplored President Trump’s immigration policies, all from the NewsBusters’ archives:
■ “From the birther campaign to the talk of Mexican rapists, Trump has always trafficked in fear-mongering. This time, to stoke those fears and present himself as the country’s protector, he chose to punish ordinary men, women and children who are fleeing terrorism and violence, who are willing to brave the odds, bear the hardships and separate from family and home, all to try to come to America. These people are the road kill of Trump’s posturing. But something else is being destroyed along with it: The image, reputation and good will of the United States as the beacon of the world. As someone noted over the past few days, Donald Trump seems to want to turn off that lamp on the Statue of Liberty.”
— Host Fareed Zakaria on CNN’s Fareed Zakaria GPS, January 29, 2017.■ “We can imagine a future of jackboots crashing through our doors at 2am, trucks in the streets to take people to the internment camps, bright lights and barking dogs — and worse....In its first week, the Trump administration demonstrated its contempt for Mexicans, for Muslims and for Jews. I imagine the true list is longer. Much longer. Should we keep quiet as we watch this? Is this why America was created?...Our long national nightmare may have just begun.”
— Former White House correspondent for U.S. News & World Report Roger Simon in his February 1, 2017 Politico column.■ “Of all the actions Trump has taken, none has been as cruel, thoughtless or divisive as deporting hundreds of thousands of young people who’ve done nothing but go to school, work hard and present themselves to the government. The party of Lincoln has become the party of Charlottesville, Arpaio, DACA repeal and the Muslim ban. Embodying the very worst sentiments and driven by irrational anger, it deserves not defense but extinction.”
— Washington Post columnist Jennifer Rubin in September 4, 2017 online blog post “Ending DACA would be Trump’s most evil act.”
■ “This [ending DACA] is one of the most cruel acts we’ve seen in the presidency in a long time....Increasingly there is a sign out there that’s been hung up in the White House or outside the White House saying, if you’re not white, you’re not especially welcome.”
— CNN’s Senior Political Analyst David Gergen on CNN Tonight with Don Lemon, September 5, 2017.■ “What kind of person would send back people who have been working here, who have contributed to this country, who have children here, who will be separated from their children from their communities? What kind of inhumane beast? Are you raised by wolves?”
— Washington Post columnist Jennifer Rubin on MSNBC’s AM Joy, January 14, 2018.■ “Mr. Trump also used those he invited to send a darker message. In a passage on immigration, he pointed out four relatives of people murdered by undocumented immigrants; he had invited the victims’ families to sit in the box with his wife, Melania. This was showmanship, too, but of a much darker kind, meant to whip up fear against undocumented immigrants by implying that they’re more dangerous than native-born Americans. Study after study shows that immigrants commit crimes at a lower rate than native-born Americans.”
— New York Times movie critic James Poniewozik during a live-blogging session for Trump’s State of the Union speech, February 28, 2018.■ “Let me be very clear. The addition of a citizenship question [to the Census] is to keep immigrants and their families in the shadows, it is to disenfranchise cities with large immigrant and minority populations and it is to skew congressional redistricting that happens in 2020 to disenfranchise largely Democratic states and cities that have large minority and immigrant populations. That is why there’s a citizenship question.”
— CBS News correspondent Alex Wagner on HBO’s Real Time with Bill Maher, April 20, 2018.
■ “We went straight to the facility, the location where kids and their parents were reunited. All I can say after talking to the people, watching the people, listening to the people, the Statue of Liberty, I think, is weeping right now.”
— Co-host Gayle King discussing border detention centers for children on CBS This Morning, June 18, 2018.
■ “Children are being marched away to showers, just like the Nazis said they were taking people to the showers, and then they never came back. You’d think they would use another trick.”
— Co-host Joe Scarborough on MSNBC’s Morning Joe, June 15, 2018.■ “Increasingly, Donald Trump is turning this nation into Nazi Germany and turning these [detention centers] into concentration camps.”
— CNN political commentator Donald Johnson on CNN Newsroom, June 16, 2018.■ Host Andrea Mitchell: “You posited that it’s either incompetence or evil. I would suggest that it could be both — that there is an evil desire to deter by making an example of these people, and then it was carried out with no planning — and that is the rank incompetence that makes it even that much worse.”
MSNBC Legal Analyst Mimi Rocah: “Absolutely, and you’re right. It shouldn’t be presented as an either, or. It could be both.”
— Discussion of Trump administration immigration policy on MSNBC Live, July 10, 2018.
■ NPR’s Latino USA anchor Maria Hinojosa: “It looks like this President really doesn’t care about our lives, whether we’re in cages, whether we’re in freezers in those immigrant detention camps, or whether we are dead in Puerto Rico.”...
USA Today columnist Kurt Bardella: “People aren’t stupid. They realize that ultimately this is a racist party, and I don’t know why any single person who isn’t a white person would vote for a Republican right now.”
— MSNBC’s AM Joy, September 15, 2018.■ “S-hole countries, putting kids in cages, investigating and trying to take away people’s immigration rights, revoking people who have been allowed to come here as asylum seekers. This is white nationalism as a policy, and they can try to claim efficiency all they want, but they never demonstrate the numbers.”
— The Root’s politics editor and MSNBC political contributor Jason Johnson on MSNBC Live, September 24, 2018.■ “When he [Donald Trump] invokes this question of immigration and you say it plays with the Republican base, it’s all about a certain conception of whiteness. This man, this moral monster is playing to those base instincts....So it may play politically and if it does it shows that the country is profoundly racist.”
— MSNBC contributor and Princeton professor Eddie Glaude on MSNBC Live, October 30, 2018.
■ “If Jesus were today or Trump was back then, he would have been separated from his parents. Joseph and Mary would have been put in a separate detention center — he would have been put in a separate detention center, and he might likely have died in custody like another child did over the holidays.”
— SiriusXM radio talk show host Mark Thompson on MSNBC Live with Stephanie Ruhle, January 2, 2019.■ “Mr. Trump is not the first president to ask for money for a wall. George H.W. Bush, Bill Clinton and George W. Bush built fences and walls along the southern border. Barack Obama maintained the resulting system of roughly 700 miles of physical barriers. So why don’t we want Mr. Trump to build his wall? What is different? The difference is that Mr. Trump’s wall is a symbol of hate and racism.”
— Univision anchor Jorge Ramos in a January 9, 2019 New York Times op-ed.■ “The wall originated as a device to jog the President’s memory, to make sure to remind him to cater to the most xenophobic part of the base of the Republican Party because there is a cluster of people in the Republican Party who catapulted Trump to his win in the primaries who hate and/or fear immigrants and not only that, these are people who define their political life by stemming and stopping the invasion of people who do not look like them....Those people cannot be appeased because what they want is not policy. What they want is an ethnically pure America.”
— Host Chris Hayes on MSNBC’s All In, January 10, 2019.
■ “If you refer to immigrants as an infestation as the President has, if you promote bigoted stereotypes about their unique depravity and talk about them as a nefarious band of infiltrators you will promote the conditions for cruelty as surely as affect follows cause. There is a body count to the President’s rhetoric now, and unless something changes, it is going to grow.”
— Host Chris Hayes discussing the death of a migrant child, as aired on MSNBC’s All In with Chris Hayes, May 22, 2019.■ “[Donald Trump] is not only criminalizing, but he’s also demonizing and dehumanizing immigrants.”
— Univision anchor Maria Elena Salinas on MSNBC Live with Craig Melvin, June 27, 2019.■ “We did open the door quite a bit with past policies to President Trump having these kids tortured essentially in these incarcerated, you know, states that they have right now....What we have right now is torture....What we have now is, essentially what you stated before, a Guantanamo Bay for children.”
— Rolling Stone senior writer Jamil Smith on MSNBC’s AM Joy, June 29, 2019.■ “You now have a President, as you said, talking about exterminating Latinos.”
— Host Nicolle Wallace on MSNBC’s Deadline: White House, August 5, 2019.■ “In the case of separations, you had 5,400 plus kids who are permanently traumatized, tortured systematically by the U.S. government, in the words of Physicians for Human Rights.”
— Correspondent Jacob Soboroff on MSNBC’s Deadline: White House, July 9, 2020.
■ “[Donald Trump aide] Stephen Miller always encourages Trump’s most aggressive and most violent impulses, which Trump appreciates because every time he listens to a more moderate adviser he gets pummeled and ridiculed by his base as weak, which Trump hates. He wants to be seen as a killer and Stephen Miller shares his instincts for violence. He has his fingers on the pulse of his most violent voting base who want to see these really hostile policies separating children from parents, systematically turning away the most vulnerable, most desperate people at the U.S./Mexico border.”
— KPBS San Diego reporter and author Jean Guerrero on MSNBC’s Morning Joe, August 10, 2020.■ “This is considered torture — taking breast-feeding children from their moms and separating families in this way. And all I could think of when we were preparing for this segment today talking to my producers is whether or not these are considered international crimes, meaning: Should members of this administration come up before The Hague for what they’ve done. Jeff Sessions, the former, you know, DHS head, all of them….and Donald Trump maybe?”
— Host Joy Reid on MSNBC’s The ReidOut, October 7, 2020.■ “We’ve gone from indecency to decency….We’ve gone from what can only be called idolatry and false religion under Trump, this worship of greed and this lust for conquest, one American over another, to really what the religion, the true religion is supposed to be, at least when I grew up in church….We try to love our fellow man, we try to be brothers and sisters, we try to care about the poor, the immigrant, we try to care about those in need. That’s the creed. That is the Christian creed. It’s what it was supposed to be before it was about stealing the children of migrants.”
— MSNBC’s The ReidOut host Joy Reid on MSNBC’s live coverage of Joe Biden’s Inauguration, January 20, 2021.
For more examples from our flashback series, which we call the NewsBusters Time Machine, go here.
