Trump’s Hateful New Rants at Rally Are Harshly Debunked by Town Leader

They are taking from us. At bottom, that’s a key message that Donald Trump and his partner in slime, J.D. Vance, are running on when they falsely attack immigrants for eating pets, spreading diseases, or whatever other MAGA Two-Minute Hate they’re drumming up at any given moment. Everything is reducible to zero-sum demagoguery, even when none of the facts support it, which in every one of these cases, they don’t.

Trump’s repugnant new claims about immigrants in another small town—Charleroi, in southwestern Pennsylvania—expose the ugly underbelly of that zero-sum messaging in a fresh way. At a rally near Pittsburgh on Monday, Trump unleashed a volley of new attacks on Haitian arrivals to Charleroi, and used them to launch a broader argument about Pennsylvania, insisting that its towns and villages have been “inundated.”

In an interview, Charleroi Borough Manager Joe Manning flatly said that Trump’s claims are false or simply do not apply to his town in any sense. “There’s what the former president is saying,” Manning told me, “and then there’s easily observable reality.”

Trump’s assertions about Haitians and Charleroi echo his many lies about Springfield. He portrayed Charleroi as absolutely overrun with migrants, as if it’s succumbing to a foreign “invasion,” a word he also used at the Pennsylvania rally.

“Not far from here, the 4,000-person town of Charleroi … has seen a 2,000 percent increase in the population,” Trump seethed at the rally, which was held in Indiana, Pennsylvania. He suggested that Charleroi has become a “totally different place.”

But that’s not close to true, according to Manning. He says the town’s population of Haitians is actually “between 700 and 800.” Manning pointed out that if Trump’s claim were true—and this town of just over 4,000 had seen a 2,000 percent increase—it would suddenly have a population closer to 100,000. Recounting this idea to me, Manning burst out laughing.

At his rally, Trump also ramped up the zero-sum rhetoric about immigrants taking American jobs. “Another front in Kamala’s war on workers is her gigantic migrant invasion,” he said.

Trump even embellished this with an elaborate tale in which Harris is chief engineer behind a project to “inundate Pennsylvania communities.” He held up Charleroi as an example of this throughout, telegraphing his closing argument in this must-win state.

But this rhetoric simply doesn’t apply to Charleroi, Manning said. He noted that many of the Haitians work at a local packaging plant whose owner could not find workers, and went to an employment agency for help. That agency got Haitians to come work in the borough—in other words, locals, and not Harris, enticed them there—and they liked the place, Manning said, so they “put down roots.”

The key tell here, Manning pointed out, is that even now, with the Haitians already in the town, the packaging plant owner is still looking for workers.

“They ain’t taking anybody’s jobs,” Manning said, noting that they are helping revitalize the town, just as immigrants are reviving other Rust Belt towns amid postindustrial population decline. “They have occupied places that were vacant for years because a lot of people moved out of here,” he noted.

What about Trump’s claim that towns across Pennsylvania are being swamped by job-stealing immigrants? Well, the state’s unemployment rate is 3.4 percent, so it’s unclear how this represents a “war on workers,” as Trump says. As Paul Krugman explains, immigrants often boost employment for the native-born in such communities, because they spend money in them. As for Trump’s suggestion that immigrants are unleashing a crime wave in the state, asked whether there’s been any uptick in crime in Charleroi, Manning bluntly replied: “No.”

Obviously the facts can only go so far, because at bottom, Trump is telling an emotionally charged story. His deeper claim—reflected in the suggestion that the town is now a “totally different place”—is that this supposedly huge influx has changed its fundamental makeup beyond recognition. On this score, it’s worth reproducing a full Trump monologue from the rally:

Think of the cruelty Kamala Harris has inflicted on the people of Pennsylvania. You live in a small town your whole life. You pay your taxes. You really are exemplary. You pay everything. You do everything. You love your town. You love your country. You know the town so well. By name. You’re just so proud of it. And suddenly she flies in thousands and thousands of migrants from the most dangerous places on earth. And they deposit them right smack in the middle of your community.

Trump’s claim, at bottom, is that Haitian immigrants are stealing away people’s identity—the parts of their identity that are rooted in place, in shared local memory and custom, in blood and soil.

Indeed, at another point, Trump singled out people in the rally crowd who currently live in Charleroi. In a striking back-and-forth interaction with them, Trump asked: “Has your beautiful town changed?”

This “beautiful town” phrasing, which he tellingly used more than once at the rally, is a disarmingly devious trope. One wonders if Stephen Miller is whispering all these phrases in Trump’s right ear. They tell the same story Trump’s been telling about Springfield, Ohio, laced over with a kind of explicit language of heartland innocence and its defilement by migrant contamination.

In the face of all this, some will no doubt insist that Trump is making appeals to authentically felt disaffections that mass immigration can invoke—such as loss of community and solidarity—and that Democrats ignore such sentiments at their peril.

Democrats should respond directly to these arguments. They might say that immigration, managed properly, is not a threat to deep and cherished local attachments at all. That in America, communities are made up of layers of immigration that are themselves central to who we are. That immigrant essential workers showed extraordinary solidarity by pulling us through Covid-19. That immigrants have helped make our post-Covid economy the envy of the world. And that immigrants are helping revive middle-class flourishing in the very Rust Belt areas that Trump and Vance love to rhapsodize about.

But that aside, Trump is simply not targeting something as innocent as communal nostalgia. You cannot watch this bloodthirsty chant of “Send them back” that erupted during his rally without immediately seeing that he’s appealing to something much darker and uglier:

One has to ask: If Trump and Vance are merely speaking to something as innocent-sounding as a lost sense of community and solidarity, why do they need to resort to all these vicious, openly racist lies and smears—all these nakedly sadistic promises of “bloody” mass expulsions to come—in the first place?

By the way, speaking of solidarity in Charleroi, Manning shared an interesting anecdote. Not long ago, he said, a demonstration was organized on behalf of workers at a local cookware factory that is set to close, one that the area’s residents and politicians are working to save.

Among those on hand to advocate for keeping the plant open on workers’ behalf, Manning recounted, were none other than some newly arrived Haitians. Asked what this told him about the newcomers, Manning said: “They’re good neighbors.”