Immigration and inflation, the issues shaping Trump’s 2024 presidential campaign
There are several issues at play this election cycle, but the former president is focusing on two key topics in his bid to return to the White House.
BY NIGEL THOMPSON BY OCTOBER 16, 2024
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For the third presidential election in a row, Donald Trump is the Republican presidential nominee, and ever since his loss to Joe Biden in the 2020 election and the subsequent fallout, it’s been an extended 2024 campaign for the former president.
Policy-wise, Trump has changed his tune on some issues over the last four years, and doubled down on others.
For example, he wants to complete the border wall he started in his first term and has expanded his immigration policy plans to “carry out the largest mass deportation operation in American history,” as his campaign website reads.
But on abortion, an issue where Trump once boasted about overturning Roe v. Wade, he now appears to no longer support a national ban. However, Trump does still celebrate “sending it back to the states,” as he mentioned during his most recent debate with Vice President Kamala Harris.
Lingering in the background of Trump’s campaign is also Project 2025, a blueprint published by the Heritage Foundation, a conservative think tank, to reshape the federal government with many right-wing policies under the premise that Trump wins a second term. The policy changes are vast — from eliminating the Department of Education to cutting Medicare and Medicaid — and it would consolidate a lot of government power under the president, and allow them to appoint more people to the government loyal to their cause.
Trump has distanced himself from the project throughout the campaign as his opponent continues to try to tie him closer to it. The former president’s campaign has threatened leaders behind the plan, and Trump himself has both criticized parts of the plan and claimed he knows no one behind it. On the latter point, CNN found at least 140 former Trump employees worked on Project 2025.
Immigration is his top issue
As for Trump’s plans for a second term, immigration is once again his biggest talking point. Of the 20 core promises found on his campaign’s website used to outline his campaign’s goals, the top two pertain to immigration.
They are to “seal the border and stop the migrant invasion,” and “carry out the largest deportation operation in American history.”
Trump’s rhetoric about immigration, particularly the southern U.S. border, has fundamentally changed the discussion about the issue and the people at the center of it since he first hit a presidential campaign trail in 2016.
His classification of the migration of people across the border as an “invasion” uses language his Republican Party has latched onto, and both have used the incendiary language to push Democrats in power to enact similar harsh immigration policies.
It’s also led to anti-immigrant violence, such as the killing of 23 people (mostly Latinos) at a Walmart in El Paso on Aug. 3, 2019, by a lone gunman. It is the deadliest attack targeting Latinos in U.S. history, and before carrying out the massacre, the gunman posted an anti-immigrant manifesto online citing the popular white nationalist theory called “The Great Replacement.” It’s a belief that immigrants, specifically those who are non-white, are replacing white people in certain countries like the U.S.
Recently, after Trump falsely claimed during his debate with Harris that Haitian immigrants in Springfield, Ohio were eating household dogs and cats, schools, grocery stores, and other vital services in the town were forced to close or implement security protocols due to bomb threats.
Trump’s idea of “sealing” the border is to complete his border wall along the U.S.-Mexico border. When it comes to carrying out the largest deportation in the country’s history, the former President said he’s targeting all of the 11 million unauthorized immigrants in the country, according to stats from the Department of Homeland Security.
To help extend the reach of ICE, Trump has said he would enlist the help of local enforcement agencies and the National Guard around the country to round up the unauthorized immigrants for deportation.
Further down his 20 core promises list is also a push to “stop the migrant crime epidemic,” which targets drug cartels and the violence they bring across the U.S. border.
The narrative that immigrants bring crime to the U.S. is something that NPR traced back to the 1980s, and there have been multiple studies since that have proven the theory to have no merit. One by the Marshall Project put out in 2019 found a flat trend of crime in the metro areas it analyzed where immigrants moved. Another by the New York Times in 2018 found that as the immigration rate has skyrocketed since the 1980s, the violent crime rate has gone down significantly in the U.S.
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The economy and inflation are a close second
When he’s not talking about immigration, Trump spends most of his airtime criticizing the U.S. economy under Joe Biden, with a focus on inflation. It's also the top concern for many voters.
The third core promise of his campaign is to end inflation and “make America affordable again.” While a president doesn’t have sole control over inflation, it is influenced by certain policies and who they appoint to the Federal Reserve, which sets interest rates.
Trump’s policies to potentially help lower costs include deregulating much of the energy sector and opening more federal lands (particularly in the Arctic) for oil drilling to lower energy costs. He’s also mentioned using federal land for large-scale housing production to reduce its cost, and also gone back to his hallmark issue of immigration. In his view, the deportation of undocumented immigrants living in the U.S. would also free up more housing and drive down its cost.
As for taxes, Trump wants to extend the tax cuts he implemented in 2017 that are set to expire next year but is now also tweaking parts of that original plan regarding housing and local and state tax deductions. He’s also promoted a 15% corporate tax rate, which is even lower than in his 2017 bill. The other idea of note — and even one he and Harris agree on — is the elimination of taxes on tips.
In hopes of bolstering manufacturing in the U.S., Trump is pushing a 10% to 20% tariff on most foreign goods, with China facing the harshest tariff at 60%. Economists have said that while boosting homegrown manufacturing, increased tariffs on imported goods could raise inflation. That, and his massive deportation plan with immigration is predicted to also have potentially debilitating economic effects.
Foreign policy and other “issues”
Touching on other parts of Trump’s 20 core promises are points addressing foreign policy and certain issues made vitriolic by right-wing narratives in the lead-up to 2024.
The former president has long criticized the Biden-Harris administration for its support of Ukraine in its ongoing war with Russia and its handling of the Israel-Hamas war in the Middle East.
Trump has not laid out any concrete plans as to how he would end both conflicts, saying rather in his debate with Harris that both wouldn’t have happened if he were president. But it’s clear he wants to end them to prevent what his campaign calls “World War III.”
On the domestic front when addressing the Israel-Hamas War specifically, Trump’s campaign goes again back to his top issue of immigration, threatening to deport pro-Palestinian (the campaign calls them “pro-Hamas”) protestors at college campuses nationwide.
Rounding out his top 20 issues are the right-wing talking points to “keep men out of women’s sports,” a harmful narrative targeting trans women athletes that compete in women’s sports, but one that affects all trans athletes; and a promise to cut federal funding for any school pushing “critical race theory, radical gender ideology, and other inappropriate racial, sexual, or political content on our children.”
Election Day is Tuesday, November 5. The last day to register to vote in Pennsylvania is Oct. 21.
