October 13, 2024 04:21 PM UTC

Down The Darkest Rabbit Hole To A Place Trump Calls Aurora

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• by: Colorado Pols

The dust has settled in the extreme northern smidge of the city of Aurora next to Denver International Airport where ex-President Donald Trump held a rally Friday to promote his fictional narrative of the “takeover” of this Republican-controlled city of 400,000 by migrant gangs, to be followed shortly by the overrunning of the entire state and the forcible exile of Gov. Jared Polis–unless the state abandons its political evolution over the last two decades and helps elect Trump President in November.

As Colorado Public Radio reports, yesterday was about telling a story to the rest of America of a Colorado Coloradans wouldn’t recognize:

In his remarks, Trump declared, “I love this state. This state has to flip Republican,” to raucous cheers.

He said he could be spending time on the most beautiful beaches in the world but instead, he came to Colorado to figure out what “the hell happened to Aurora.”

He blasted Gov. Jared Polis, referring to him as a coward, a fraud and pathetic. He also blamed Vice-President Kamala Harris for the surge in new immigrants arriving in the country in the past two years.

“Kamala has imported an army of illegal alien gang members and migrant criminals from the dungeons of the third world,” said Trump. “And she has had them resettled, beautifully, into your community to prey upon innocent American citizens, that’s what they’re doing. And no place is it more evident than right here.” [Pols emphasis]

Every one of the above statements is false, starting with Trump’s claim that he “loves” the state of Colorado, where the state’s Republicans embarrassingly gave Trump the shaft in 2016 and the whole state rejected him in 2016 and 2020–leading to what is universally agreed to have been Trump’s political retaliation against our state by awarding the U.S. Space Command to Alabama over Colorado Springs on his way out of office.

As we’ve discussed, Trump’s claim that “no place is” his fictional hellscape of a nation besieged “more evident than right here” from the venue of the swanky Gaylord Resort barely within the city of Aurora is laughable on its face to locals who know better. Nonetheless, the Gaylord served as the launch pad Friday for what Trump has decided to call “Operation Aurora,” the latest rebranding for Trump’s promise to carry out the largest mass deportations in American history.

As Politico’s Myah Ward reports, Trump’s speech in Aurora on Friday showcased the increasingly dark turn his campaign has taken in recent weeks as the polls flipped in favor of Vice President Kamala Harris, with the most direct appeals to racial animus yet seen from a candidate who has pushed those boundaries ever since he first ran for President in 2015:

Donald Trump vowed to “rescue” the Denver suburb of Aurora, Colorado, from the rapists, “blood thirsty criminals,” and “most violent people on earth” he insists are ruining the “fabric” of the country and its culture: immigrants.

Trump’s message in Aurora, a city that has become a central part of his campaign speeches in the final stretch to Election Day, marks another example of how the former president has escalated his xenophobic and racist rhetoric against migrants and minority groups he says are genetically predisposed to commit crimes. [Pols emphasis] The supposed threat migrants pose is the core part of the former president’s closing argument, as he promises his base that he’s the one who can save the country from a group of people he calls “animals,” “stone cold killers,” the “worst people,” and the “enemy from within.”

…In his lengthy speech Friday, Trump delivered a broadside against the thousands of Venezuelan migrants in Aurora. And he declared that he would use the Alien Enemies Act, which allows a president to authorize rounding up or removing people who are from enemy countries in times of war, to pursue migrant gangs and criminal networks.

“Kamala [Harris] has imported an army of illegal alien gang members and migrant criminals from the dungeons of the third world … from prisons and jails and insane asylums and mental institutions, and she has had them resettled beautifully into your community to prey upon innocent American citizens,” he said.

It’s not enough to simply observe that this description of Aurora has no basis in reality. It is some of the most dangerous and hateful rhetoric ever directed by a major Presidential candidate against an American community. Again, these are boundaries that Trump has wilfully pushed for years, but in the final stretch of a race whose fundamentals have flipped against him, Trump has plunged down an ever-darker rhetorical hole in which all reality is turned on its head: the booming economy is another depression, the migration crisis Trump refused to allow to be addressed is a deliberate tool of Democrats to “poison” the country, and only Trump can save American from the “animals” who have overrun Aurora and are coming for your town next.

The Republican candidate in the state’s most competitive congressional race, Gabe Evans, jumped on the “Aurora Has Fallen” bandwagon early on, so it’s not surprising that he got a marquee speaking slot at Trump’s rally, where he promised to be part of a MAGA House Majority devoted to carrying out the ex-President’s agenda:

We can flip this seat and we can make sure that Donald Trump has a Republican majority in the U.S. House of Representatives when he’s reelected as the 47th president of the United States.

This is the same event that Aurora’s Republican Mayor Mike Coffman claimed to welcome as an opportunity to show Trump that he had been duped by election-year misinformation, based on the improbably naive assumption Trump has any desire to be corrected. As Trump amply demonstrated yesterday to Mayor Mike’s dismay, the truth of what’s happening in Aurora is irrelevant. After learning that Trump would not be venturing beyond the safe confines of the Gaylord Resort to discover that Aurora has in no way “fallen,” Coffman released yet another carefully worded statement that condemns the falsehoods without calling out their principal source:

There were thousands of people who attended the rally today, some of whom might have visited Aurora for the first time, who were able to see firsthand the mischaracterizations of our great community. I am disappointed that the former president did not get to experience more of our city for himself. I cannot overstate enough that nothing was said today that has not been said before and for which the city has not responded with the facts. Again, the reality is that the concerns about Venezuelan gang activity in our city – and our state – have been grossly exaggerated and have unfairly hurt the city’s identity and sense of safety.

Before Trump visited, Coffman’s mealy-mouthed hope to “educate” the former President, who Coffman still tells all inquiring reporters he intends to vote for, could be explained as a good faith attempt by Coffman to intercede honestly with Trump and reduce the damage these falsehoods are doing to the city’s economy. Now that Trump has set foot in the city to indifferently use one of its swankiest resorts as a backdrop for his message that “Aurora Has Fallen,” Coffman’s failure to condemn Trump as the principal circulator of the lies about Aurora is a full-scale moral abdication. That Trump decided to brand his anti-immigrant crusade “Operation Aurora” should be Coffman’s last straw. But in 2024, even after Coffman publicly broke with Trump to save his own skin eight years ago, there apparently is no boundary Trump can’t cross to cost him Coffman’s support.

Colorado is not considered a competitive state in this year’s presidential election, with Kamala Harris leading Trump by as much as 15 points in current polls. Trump came to a state he cannot win to double down on a story that locals know is false, so the audience was clearly not Colorado voters. This was about reinforcing the fantasy that “Aurora Has Fallen” for voters in other states, in direct challenge to attempts like Coffman’s to correct Trump’s misinformation.

If Trump succeeds, it’s a blow to the value of truth itself from which American politics may never recover.