Elbahrain.net Donald Trump had an apocalyptic warning for a group of farmers in swing state Pennsylvania: If he loses the election, “You won’t have a farm very long.”
Trump spoke Monday at an event highlighting his vow to protect rural Americans from the perceived predatory power of China, at which he also showed that when he tries to focus, he can assemble effective, populist economic arguments that help explain his dominance in polls on the most important issue in the election.
But Trump’s prediction about mass bankruptcies in the agricultural sector also echoed a familiar refrain — one that is the foundation of his pessimistic political creed. The ex-president adapts this construct to almost any audience as he evokes a vision of a nation wracked by crime, economic blight and an immigrant invasion.
Most politicians court voters by offering them an optimistic vision, peddling hope and promises of change. Democratic nominee Kamala Harris is seeking to sweep away Trump’s somber picture of America in crisis by invoking joy and a new kind of “opportunity economy.” Trump, however, mostly dishes out fear and threats.
He, for instance, warned Americans at his debate with Harris that “you’re going to end up in World War III.” In a Fox News Town Hall earlier this month, he warned that “this country will end up in a depression if she becomes president. Like 1929.” He brands Harris a “communist” and “Comrade” as he implicitly argues that if he loses, America won’t have an economy anymore.
In another twist of his extreme rhetoric, Trump also seems to be seeking scapegoats should he lose the election in just over 40 days.
Last week, at an event on antisemitism, the former president warned that “the Jewish people” would be partly to blame if he loses in November. He seemed to be suggesting, as he as in the past, that Jews shouldn’t vote for Democrats because without his fervent support for far-right Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, there might not be an Israel anymore. The comments were just the latest occasion when he’s invoked an antisemitic trope that suggests American Jews have dual loyalties. The Biden administration, while calling on Netanyahu to do more to spare Palestinian civilians, has sent vast resources to the Middle East to protect Israel, notably when it led an international effort to repel a massive Iranian missile attack in April.
Taking aim at another faith group, the former president wrote on social media Monday that Catholic voters “should have their head examined” if they back Harris, implying that worshippers wouldn’t have Catholicism any more with a baseless claim that “Catholics are literally being persecuted by this administration.”
Over the weekend, the ex-president tapped out a bizarre, patriarchal, all caps message on Truth Social that came across more like a dictate from an authoritarian state than a promise as he vowed “WOMEN WILL BE HAPPY, HEALTHY, CONFIDENT AND FREE” if he is elected president again.
At a rally in Pennsylvania on Monday night, Trump — who was found liable by a federal jury in a civil case for sexual abuse and is trailing Harris among female voters — told America’s women: “I am your protector. I want to be your protector. As president, I have to be your protector.”
Farmers as a metaphor for the US economy
Against this backdrop, Trump’s ominous warning to farmers sounded rather familiar. He claimed that energy prices would skyrocket in a Harris administration and bankrupt agricultural businesses in rural areas that mostly support him. “If they get in, your energy costs are going to through the roof — they are going through the roof, OK? You won’t have a farm very long, I will tell you that,” Trump said.
The conjured threat that farms — the fabric of rural life — could be wiped out in a Harris administration plays into the ex-president’s core theme at the debate, namely that “our country is being lost. We’re a failing nation.”
His comments also echoed one of his most notorious and chilling remarks as president, when he told a crowd on January 6, 2021, to march to the US Capitol and “fight like hell” otherwise they were “not going to have a country anymore.”
The Republican nominee’s warnings of disaster are not a new wrinkle. In 2020, with Covid-19 rampant, he warned that if he was not reelected, there would be “no kids in school, no graduations, no weddings, no Thanksgiving, no Christmas and no Fourth of July together.” While such rituals were severely disrupted when he was in office in 2020, the country gradually got back on its feet under Biden, who used his first Independence Day celebrations in office to declare independence from the virus, even if it ultimately took longer for normal life to resume.
Some of this rhetoric is classic overkill from a lifelong salesman — or what Trump once called “truthful hyperbole” in his treatise “The Art of the Deal.”
But once he turned from business to politics, Trump’s exaggerations took on a more sinister dimension. His searing 2016 Republican National Convention address warned America was sliding into poverty, violence and corruption. In the White House, “truthful hyperbole” became “alternative facts” as Trump invented new realities that better served his personal and political goals.
With his menacing predictions of America’s future if Harris wins, the former president is adopting a tactic typically used by strongmen and dictatorial leaders overseas who personalize leadership and predict disaster unless they are in power. Things get so bad that only a strongman’s touch can save the country. “I alone can fix it,” Trump pledged at the Republican National Convention in 2016. He expanded on his theme this year in one of his frequent tributes to hardline Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orbán during a Fox interview: “They say he is a strongman,” mused Trump. “Sometimes you need a strongman.”
