Trump plays the fear card on the economy – and it seems to be working

(CNN) — 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.”

How Trump’s rhetoric attracts supporters

One reason why Trump’s rhetoric has been effective — at least in cementing the loyal base of the Republican Party — is that it channels the feelings of many voters and legitimizes them.

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

The former president on Monday played into anger over the way globalization and industrialization has cut a swathe through small farms in recent decades. And he lashed out at China, both over its efforts to buy US farmland and over what he said was its failure to buy $50 billion in US agricultural produce under a trade deal that he worked out with President Xi Jinping before the pandemic. Many experts raised doubts that China would live up to the terms when Trump made it — although the then-president hailed the agreement as one of the greatest deals in history.

Trump blamed Biden for failing to hold Beijing’s feet to the fire. And he promised that one of his first acts as president would be to call Xi and set him straight — not just on agricultural issues but to demand he impose the death penalty on manufacturers of precursor chemicals for fentanyl, which has caused the deaths of tens of thousands of Americans in overdoses. There is zero chance that America’s superpower rival would respond to such an order positively, but Trump’s threat made him look strong in standing up for US interests.

“Nobody has done for farmers what I have done,” Trump declared. Yet much of his generosity in sending billions of dollars in subsidies to the industry while he was in office was designed to mitigate the impact of his trade war with Beijing.

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

And Trump also said he’d impose a 200% tariff on tractor maker John Deere if it moved production to factories in Mexico. “I’m just notifying John Deere right now: If you do that, we’re putting a 200% tariff on everything that you want to sell into the United States,” Trump said. “It’s hurting our farmers. It’s hurting our manufacturing.” John Deere announced in July that it will lay off about 600 employees across three US factories as the Illinois-based company shifts production to a planned facility in Ramos, Mexico.

The fights that Trump picks in the past haven’t always helped US workers. Investments and jobs that the ex-president promised he’d save often didn’t materialize. And President Joe Biden has frequently highlighted his own investments in manufacturing and infrastructure that the ex-president failed to deliver.

But Trump’s enduring — and critics say fictionalized — image as a shrewd businessman and his knack for populist photo-ops help explain new polls by The New York Times and Siena College on Monday that showed that 55% of respondents in Arizona, North Carolina and Georgia said Trump would do a better job managing the economy compared to 42% who picked Harris.

The vice president has sought to narrow the advantage by adopting her own populist streak — taking aim at what she says is price gouging by supermarket chains and accusing Trump of planning massive new tax cuts for the richest Americans that would mirror those during his first term. Like Trump, Harris argues that US Steel should remain American owned in opposing a sale to Nippon Steel — Japan’s biggest steelmaker.

Harris plans to give another speech on the economy later this week in which she will flesh out details of a plan designed to spread the robust economic recovery more equally and to help working Americans get on the housing ladder.

But Harris has rarely conducted the kind of roundtable event that Trump attended on Monday with farmers. Even if the group appeared to be made up of strong Trump supporters, the optics of the meeting sent a message as the former president, for once, spent more time listening than speaking.

Later, the former president pulled off another photo-op that demonstrated the advantage he holds over Harris, who must run for president as an incumbent member of an administration given poor marks by voters over high prices.

Fresh from his warnings of a looming wipeout of American farms, Trump stopped at a grocery store in Kittanning, Pennsylvania, and handed a woman cash to help her pay for her groceries. “Here, it just went down a hundred bucks,” Trump said. “We’ll do that for you from the White House.”

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