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00:00Turning to the United States now, where former President Donald Trump doubled down on his
00:04demonization of immigrants in a speech Thursday, the presidential candidate describing the
00:09U.S. as a country occupied, these are his words, by hordes of foreign criminals.
00:14Now, that 80-minute-long diatribe, I think, is really the only way you can describe it,
00:19illustrates just how unfiltered Republican rhetoric on immigration has become.
00:24Take a listen.
00:26These are the people that we have coming into our country, and we're now known as, and all
00:31throughout the world, as an occupied country.
00:33We're an occupied country, can you believe it?
00:36And you know, they have a lot of people, if you think about it, 21 million, not including
00:42the gotaways.
00:43You know what a gotaway is?
00:44Those are the people that just run and nobody knows who the hell they are.
00:47All right, well, I have on set with me now France 24's Ketavan Ghorjasani, international
00:52affairs editor, and of course our former Washington correspondent, hi Ketavan.
00:56Hello.
00:57So what is Donald Trump trying to achieve with these incendiary comments in Aurora,
01:01Colorado?
01:02Well, first of all, it's interesting that he went to Colorado, because if you think
01:06about it, Colorado hasn't voted for a Republican president in 20 years, so it's not a battleground
01:12state at all.
01:13But he chose Aurora because it was a way of in-person making a case on an issue that he
01:20believes is an issue that is positive for the Republicans, which is the issue of immigration.
01:25And he repeated those false or at the very least grossly exaggerated claims about undocumented
01:34immigrants in that city.
01:36So Aurora is a suburb of Denver.
01:38It has around 400,000 residents there.
01:43And we heard what he said about that town, about how it was invaded, occupied.
01:48And he's really referring to something that happened back in the summer, which is that
01:52there were reports that three apartment complexes, we're talking about three apartment complexes
01:57in a city of 400,000 residents, where managers were saying that they couldn't get to those
02:02buildings because they were controlled by armed Venezuelan gang members.
02:09And so that was what was blocking them.
02:12That has turned into what we heard from the former president saying that the city is overrun
02:19and controlled by gang members.
02:21It has been debunked several times by local officials, including the Republican, the conservative
02:27Republican mayor of the city, who had to put out a statement stating that migrant gangs
02:32had not taken over the city and that the incidents were really limited to just a handful of building
02:38in that city. And that law enforcement had already been on the case and were responding
02:43and pointing out that major crimes had actually gone down 17 percent in this city of Aurora.
02:50But it reminds us of some very similar story that we saw in Springfield, Ohio, where Donald
02:58Trump insisted repeatedly that Haitian migrants were actually in the U.S. legally, were taking
03:05over that town and not only taking over that town, that they were in this country illegally
03:09and that they were eating people's pets, cats and dogs.
03:14There again, the local officials, Republican mayors, Republican officials, Republican governor
03:19coming out and saying this is simply not true.
03:23But as you said, this is a rhetoric, dehumanizing rhetoric to point out the issue of immigration,
03:30calling immigrants animals.
03:32He recently talked about how the immigrants were bringing in bad genes in the United States,
03:37that they were monsters and that they needed to be stomped because he believes that immigration
03:41is an issue that can be an issue that helps him win the election in November.
03:46So that gives, that's one element of Donald Trump's strategy as time dwindles ahead of
03:51this presidential election.
03:53Now with just three weeks left then, what are his and Kamala Harris's strategies in
03:58a more general sense moving forward?
04:00Well, there is, of course, the idea of motivating your base and getting your base to turn out
04:06and vote.
04:07But you're also right now in the last few weeks trying to reach those pursuable voters,
04:13those who maybe haven't made up their minds yet, aren't really sure about whether they're
04:17going to vote.
04:18And you're seeing this with Donald Trump.
04:19Yes, he's made some very incendiary comments about immigrants, especially South American
04:24immigrants.
04:25But he's also trying to court those same Latino voters who are U.S. citizens.
04:32He's doing a roundtable with Latinos.
04:34He's doing a town hall with Univision, Spanish language channel.
04:39He's also trying to court women, where he has a massive gap with Kamala Harris.
04:45He's going to hold a town hall with Fox News that is going to be an audience exclusively
04:50made up of women to talk about women's issues.
04:53And Kamala Harris, she's doing sort of the same thing.
04:56She's trying to court Republicans who don't want to vote for Donald Trump.
05:00You had that rally with Liz Cheney, for example.
05:04She's also she was also in Arizona with a rally that was called Country Over Party.
05:10But she's also courting her weakest spot, which is men without a college degree.
05:15And she's doing a lot of podcasts that are really listened to by a lot of males and especially
05:21young males, young black men and young Latino men.
05:25She did All the Smoke, a basketball podcast.
05:27And she's going to do Breakfast Club with Charlamagne Tha God, which has 8 million people
05:34tuning in and mostly males and especially men of color, which is a group with which,
05:41yes, she's doing better than Donald Trump, but not in the same gaps that Joe Biden won
05:47in 2020 with.
05:48So she's trying to reconstruct the coalition that helped Joe Biden win in 2020.
05:54Ketavan Ghorjasdani, thank you very much.