The story got lost amidst the Clinton e-mail furor, but over the weekend, there was an incident that in many ways encapsulated the frustrating debate over immigration in this campaign. And there’s little doubt that had the ideological poles of the victims and villains been switched, we would have been hearing it from wall to wall on the news. Once again, leftists precipitated violence against Trump and his supporters, in this case, knocking down and repeatedly cursing a homeless African-American woman who was supporting Trump and “defending” his star on the walk of fame.
Just a day earlier the star had been attacked with a sledgehammer by a wealthy heir to the Otis elevator fortune, who was last seen in the news a few years ago auctioning off a number of Mahatma Gandhi–related artifacts to a wealthy Indian businessman for almost $2 million.
The symbolism was inescapable — a highly privileged, wealthy member of the establishment violently attacking Trump — and being celebrated for doing so — while a person who is almost the demographic epitome of underprivilege by liberal lights was defending Trump — yet she was largely ignored outside of the conservative media since her cause was unpopular.
The woman’s sign, which she held aloft, said it all: “20 Million illegals and Americans sleep on the streets in tents. Vote Trump.” That one sign held a more succinct message and powerful message on immigration than the entire apparatus of the GOP consultant class has managed to put out in order to attract working class African Americans and Hispanics to an enforcement-first immigration policy.
The working class, and in particular the African-American and Hispanic working class, are the ones most devastated by the Democrats open-borders policies. And the GOP’s failure to make that case effectively to those voters must rank as one of the singular failures in contemporary American politics.
In the primaries, Ted Cruz had one of the best ads in the 2016 political cycle pointing this out, imagining what the reaction to illegal immigration would be if it were wealthy lawyers and bankers were sneaking over the border, rather than agricultural and construction workers. Unfortunately, he’s one of the few in the GOP who has been able to tell that story in a memorable way.
Meanwhile a homeless woman is capable of stating what one of the core GOP messages on immigration should be better than our millionaire consultant class and top political leadership.
I’m getting ready to go trick-or-treating with my kids in a couple of hours — but there’s nothing I’ll see on Halloween night that is as scary as that reality. One of my kids is going dressed as Zombie Uncle Sam (his idea, not mine) — it’s a fitting commentary on the state of our politics in this election season. If the GOP doesn’t figure out how to reach more non-white voters and explain to them how open-borders harms their interests, this party, Trump or no Trump, will eventually join the walking dead.