Trump is playing the fear card on the economy – and it appears to be working

CNN
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Donald Trump has issued an apocalyptic warning to a group of farmers in the swing state of Pennsylvania: If he loses the election, “you won’t have any farms for a long time.”

Trump spoke at an event Monday where he emphasized his promise to protect rural America from the alleged predatory power of China, and showed that when he tries to focus, he can marshal effective populist economic arguments that help explain his dominance in polls on the most important issue in the election.

But Trump’s prediction of massive farm failures also drew on a familiar refrain — one that’s a staple of his pessimistic political credo. The former president adapts that construct to almost any audience, evoking a vision of a nation plagued by crime, economic crisis and an immigrant invasion.

Most politicians court voters by offering them an optimistic vision, selling hope and promises of change. Democratic candidate Kamala Harris seeks to erase Trump’s bleak picture of an America in crisis by invoking joy and a new kind of “opportunity economy.” But Trump mostly spreads fear and threats.

For example, he warned Americans during a debate with Harris that “you’re going to end up in World War III.” At a Fox News Town Hall event earlier this month, he warned that “this country will end up in a depression if he becomes president. Like 1929.” He calls Harris a “communist” and a “comrade” because he implicitly claims that if he loses, America will no longer have an economy.

In another piece of his extreme rhetoric, Trump appears to be looking for a scapegoat to blame if he loses the election in just over 40 days.

Last week, at an event focused on anti-Semitism, the former president warned that “the Jewish people” would be partly to blame if he lost in November. He seemed to suggest, as he has in the past, that Jews should not vote for Democrats because without his fervent support for far-right Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, Israel might not exist. The comments were just the latest time he has invoked an anti-Semitic trope that suggests American Jews have dual loyalties. The Biden administration, while urging Netanyahu to do more to spare Palestinian civilians, has sent massive resources to the Middle East to protect Israel, especially as it led an international effort to fend off a massive Iranian missile attack in April.

On Monday, the former president, criticizing another religious group, wrote on social media that Catholic voters “should get their heads examined” if they support Harris, suggesting that the faithful would no longer practice Catholicism and baselessly claiming that “Catholics are literally being persecuted by this administration.”

Over the weekend, the former president tapped out a bizarre, all-caps patriarchal message on Truth Social that read more like an authoritarian dictate than a promise. He vowed that “WOMEN WILL BE HAPPY, HEALTHY, CONFIDENT, AND FREE” if he is re-elected.

At a rally in Pennsylvania on Monday night, Trump — who was found liable by a federal jury in a civil case for sexual harassment and is outperforming Harris among female voters — told American women: “I am your defender. I want to be your defender. As president, I have to be your defender.”

Against that backdrop, Trump’s dire warning to farmers rang familiar. He said energy prices would skyrocket under a Harris administration, bankrupting rural farms that largely support him. “If they come in, your energy costs will skyrocket — skyrocket, OK? You won’t have a farm for much longer, I’ll tell you that,” Trump said.

The imagined threat that farms — the fabric of rural life — could be destroyed in a Harris administration plays into the former president’s central debate theme: “Our country is dying. We are a failing nation.”

His comments also harkened back to one of his most famous and chilling speeches as president, when on Jan. 6, 2021, he told a crowd to march to the U.S. Capitol and “fight like hell” or “they won’t have a country anymore.”

The Republican candidate’s warnings of doom are not new. In 2020, as Covid-19 was rampant, he warned that if he wasn’t reelected, “there won’t be kids in school, graduations, weddings, Thanksgivings, Christmases, and Fourths of July together.” While such rituals were severely disrupted when he was in office in 2020, the country has gradually gotten back on its feet under Biden, who used his first Independence Day celebration in office to declare independence from the virus, even if it ultimately took longer to return to normal life.

Some of this rhetoric is classic exaggeration from a seasoned salesman — or what Trump, in his treatise “The Art of the Deal,” called “true exaggeration.”

But once he turned from business to politics, Trump’s exaggerations took on a more sinister dimension. His piercing speech at the 2016 Republican National Convention warned America of poverty, violence, and corruption. In the White House, “real exaggerations” became “alternative facts,” as Trump invented new realities that better served his personal and political goals.

With his dire predictions about America’s future if Harris wins, the former president is taking the tack of strongmen and dictatorial leaders abroad who personalize leadership and predict disaster unless they are in power. Things are getting so bad that only the touch of a strong man can save the country. “Only I can fix this,” Trump promised at the 2016 Republican National Convention. This year, he expanded on his theme in one of his frequent tributes to Hungary’s hard-line Prime Minister Viktor Orbán during an interview with Fox: “They say he’s a strong man,” Trump mused. “Sometimes you need a strong man.”

One reason Trump’s rhetoric has been effective — at least in building a loyal GOP base — is that it taps into and legitimizes the feelings of many voters.

This is where Trump’s authoritarian instincts and economic impulses meet.

The former president on Monday played up the way globalization and industrialization have cut into small farms in recent decades. And he slammed China, both for its efforts to buy American farmland and for what he said was its failure to buy $50 billion in U.S. farm products under a trade deal he hammered out with President Xi Jinping before the pandemic. Many experts have expressed doubts that China would honor the terms when Trump struck them — even though the then-president has praised the deal as one of the best in history.

Trump has blamed Biden for failing to hold Beijing accountable. He has promised that one of his first acts as president will be to call Xi and straighten him out — not just on farm issues but also by demanding the death penalty for manufacturers of fentanyl precursors, which have killed tens of thousands of Americans from overdoses. There is little chance that America’s superpower rival would respond positively to such an order, but Trump’s threat made him look strong in defense of U.S. interests.

“Nobody did what I did for farmers,” Trump said. But much of his largesse in sending billions of dollars in subsidies to industry while he was in office was intended to cushion the blow to his trade war with Beijing.

On Monday, the former president warned that if Congress tries to block him from imposing new tariffs on China, he will simply ignore lawmakers. “I don’t need them. I don’t need Congress, but they will approve it. I have the authority to impose them myself if they don’t,” the former president said.

Trump also said he would impose 200% tariffs on tractor maker John Deere if it moved production to plants in Mexico. “I’m just telling John Deere: If you do this, we will impose 200% tariffs on anything you want to sell in the United States,” Trump said. “It hurts our farmers. It hurts our manufacturing.” John Deere announced in July that it would lay off about 600 workers at three U.S. plants as the Illinois-based company moves production to a planned facility in Ramos, Mexico.

Trump’s past fights haven’t always helped American workers. Investments and jobs the former president promised to save often haven’t materialized. And President Joe Biden has often touted his own investments in manufacturing and infrastructure that the former president hasn’t delivered.

But Trump’s enduring (and critics say fictitious) image as a shrewd businessman and his knack for populist imagery help explain a new poll released Monday by The New York Times and Siena College that found that 55% of respondents in Arizona, North Carolina and Georgia believe Trump will do a better job of managing the economy, compared with 42% who said Harris.

The vice president has sought to narrow the gap by embracing her own populist streak — targeting what she calls price gouging by supermarket chains and accusing Trump of planning massive new tax cuts for the wealthiest Americans that would mirror those from his first term. Like Trump, Harris has argued that U.S. Steel should remain American-owned, opposing the sale to Nippon Steel, Japan’s largest steelmaker.

Harris plans to deliver a speech on the economy later this week, detailing a plan to spread the strong economic recovery and help working Americans gain access to housing.

But Harris has rarely held the kind of roundtables that Trump participated in with farmers on Monday. Even though the group appeared to be made up of strong Trump supporters, the optics of the meeting conveyed a message as the former president, for once, spent more time listening than talking.

The former president later did another photo op that showed his advantage over Harris, who must run for president as an incumbent in an administration that voters rated poorly because of its high prices.

Fresh off warnings of the impending collapse of American farms, Trump stopped at a grocery store in Kittanning, Pennsylvania, and handed a woman cash to help pay for her groceries. “Here you go, it just dropped a hundred bucks,” Trump said. “We’ll do it for you from the White House.”