'Occupied America': Trump further demonizes immigrants in Colorado campaign speech

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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.

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