Former president Donald Trump tried to do a charitable thing Sunday, handing out food to Texas National Guard soldiers, troopers, and others who will be working at the border during Thanksgiving. But he then complained that there wasn’t enough food left for him.
“The food looked very good. I wanted to have some, but they didn’t have any for me. They had none left. That’s not good. That’s my kind of food too,” Trump said, drawing some chuckles from the crowd.
Trump was in Texas to endorse Gov. Greg Abbott for reelection. In his endorsement speech later that same day, Trump referred to migrants as “the enemy.”
“We need a president who’s going to secure the border,” Abbott said of Trump.
Both Abbott and Trump are virulently opposed to migrants coming across the U.S. southern border and have used ugly, racist rhetoric to push their views. Abbott has started a program that buses migrants from Texas to Democratic-led cities such as New York and Washington, D.C.
Trump has promised to be even more racist and anti-immigrant than he was his first time in office. He’s said he wants immigrants to submit to “ideological screening” before they are allowed to enter the country and has vowed to bring back and expand his ban on Muslims entering the country.
“I will implement strong ideological screening of all immigrants,” Trump said in a speech last month. “If you hate America, if you want to abolish Israel, if you don’t like our religion (which a lot of them don’t), if you sympathize with jihadists, then we don’t want you in our country and you are not getting in.”
Trump has also promised to end birthright citizenship, a right guaranteed by the 14th amendment, for children of undocumented immigrants. “As part of my plan to secure the border on Day 1, I will sign an executive order making clear to federal agencies that under the correct interpretation of the law, going forward the future children of illegal aliens will not receive automatic U.S. citizenship,” Trump said in a campaign video released in May.
He also last month told far-right website The National Pulse that immigration is “a very sad thing for our country; it’s poisoning the blood of our country.”
The Biden campaign responded to Trump’s racist and xenophobic plans in a statement from campaign spokesperson Ammar Moussa earlier this month: “Mass detention camps, attempts to deny children born here citizenship, uprooting families with mass deportations — this is the horrifying reality that awaits the American people if Donald Trump is allowed anywhere near the Oval Office again. These extreme, racist, cruel policies dreamed up by him and his henchman Stephen Miller are meant to stoke fear and divide us, betting a scared and divided nation is how he wins this election.”