A new, racially divisive ad focused loosely on immigration and created by the Trump campaign, recalls an earlier political ad designed to stoke the fear of white voters.
The current video, tweeted by President Trump yesterday afternoon, begins with film footage of Luis Bracamontes, a Mexican citizen who had re-entered the US after being deported and who was convicted of killing two California law enforcement officers earlier this year. It continues with shots of chaotic crowd scenes including images of the migrant “caravan” of Central American asylum seekers, and asks the question, “Who else would Democrats let in?”
The video has raised ugly comparisons with a previous ad created by a PAC advised by former Fox News chief Roger Ailes for the 1988 George H.W. Bush campaign, which used a similarly polarizing character to alarm white voters. His name was Willie Horton.
The Bush campaign was in a tough race that summer, down some seven points to the Democratic nominee, the former governor of Massachusetts, Michael Dukakis. The ad featured Horton, a convicted murderer who had been temporarily released from prison as part of a furlough program that Dukakis had inherited. While on weekend furlough, Horton raped a woman and stabbed her fiancé. The imagery was terrifying and the message of the ad was clear: If you vote for the soft-on-crime Dukakis, good white people will be in mortal danger.
There is a long history of race-baiting in politics—even Thomas Jefferson was publicly smeared as “the son of a half-breed Indian squaw, sired by a Virginia mulatto father.” It’s important to note these tactics do lasting damage.
John F. Pfaff, an author and professor at Fordham Law School, says “the Willie Horton Effect” continues to plague criminal justice reform efforts to this day.
“Horton was an outlier—more than 99% of those allowed to go home on leaves returned without incident,” he explains. But otherwise smart attempts to reduce prison populations are derailed when other outlier incidents occur. Here’s one example: “In 2011, Arkansas passed a comprehensive criminal justice reform bill that caused its prison population to drop quickly by almost 10%.” When a single parolee committed a murder, the parole board ended reforms so aggressively that the prison population rose 17% to an all time high. “It didn’t matter that overall the reforms appeared to be safely addressing the state’s mass incarceration problem,” he says. It was just too politically costly.
Unpacking decades of racist policies abetted by political cynicism is bad enough. But in the aftermath of the Tree of Life shooting, the incendiary imagery in the latest video reads like an imminent threat, even more so because it comes with the full-throated endorsement of the Commander-in-chief.
As the days tick down to the mid-term elections, every inflammatory utterance adds to the feeling that we are being collectively pushed toward a very dangerous edge.