Giving Donald Trump advice is much like attempting to steer a hurricane — neither will change course. Yet that hasn’t stopped Republicans from offering the former president what they think is a simple prescription to reverse Vice President Kamala Harris’ momentum: Stick to the issues. Trump’s campaign “has sought to attack her on policy grounds while casting her as unfit,” reports The Washington Post. “The policy- and issue-related attacks would get more traction,” Republican pollster Neil Newhouse told The New York Times.
But there’s a problem. The GOP’s policy argument against Democrats is built on three pillars: inflation, immigration and crime. Yet on all three fronts, the Republican case is collapsing.
Last month, the Border Patrol made 56,000 apprehensions, the lowest since the fall of 2020.
One of these pillars, crime, was admittedly in shoddy shape well before 2024. When Americans understandably worried about crime rates spiking during the pandemic, Republicans pounced on the issue. Even though crime rose in liberal- and conservative-run cities and states alike, the GOP hoped to reuse its old “soft on crime” playbook from the late 20th century to put Democrats on the back foot.
Then crime rates fell in 2021 — and 2022 and 2023. Most recently, Justice Department data shows a 15% drop in violent crime in the first three months of 2024. According to the Major Cities Chiefs Association, the murder rate in nearly 70 large U.S. cities is down more than 8% since Trump left office. GOP attempts to run on reducing crime were always going to be complicated after their presidential nominee was convicted of 34 felony counts. But the data should make it impossible.
I say “should” because for Trump, crime isn’t really about crime; it’s about Black and brown people doing crime. Crime and immigration are essentially inseparable to him — and indeed the entire right-wing media machine. And with unlawful border crossings much higher for most of President Joe Biden’s tenure than under other recent presidents, conservative attacks on immigration have gone into overdrive.
So worried were Senate Democrats that earlier this year they reached a border agreement with their Republican counterparts heavily tilted toward GOP priorities. Then Trump killed the deal at the last minute anyway so he could keep campaigning on the issue. Instead, Biden issued an executive action that heavily restricted the number of asylum-seekers allowed to remain in the U.S.
But even before Biden announced that new policy, unlawful crossings were already declining. Last month, the Border Patrol made 56,000 apprehensions, the lowest since the fall of 2020. “Shelters on the southern U.S. border and in some major cities that were inundated with migrants a year ago say they are seeing sharp declines in migrants seeking refuge,” reported NBC News on Friday, “some reporting drops as high as 60% in just the past few months.”
Republicans’ best hope was that the former president could win the same way he did in 2016: in spite of himself.
How long this decline continues remains to be seen. The U.S. is counting on Mexico’s new president, Claudia Sheinbaum, to continue that country’s stepped-up enforcement against non-Mexican immigrants trying to reach the countries’ border. And as Dara Lind wrote for MSNBC about Biden’s action soon after it was announced, “generally, a crackdown engenders a ‘wait and see’ period [among would-be migrants] of a few weeks or months,” after which “the deterrent effect fades.” Our immigration system needs a complete overhaul, including far more resources. But for the moment, Democrats will take the good news.
That leaves the most important issue to voters: inflation. Sustained inflation rates not seen in years provided Biden’s greatest political obstacle aside from his age. Though polls show voters trust Harris far more than Biden on the issue, the GOP would like to change that. Republicans have wildly overstated how much fault lies with government spending, when corporate price hikes and Covid-induced supply shocks deserve far more of the blame. But they had every reason to be confident in using the issue as a cudgel against the Democrats. “You have people dying financially because they can’t buy bacon,” Trump claimed (wrongly) at his low-energy press conference Thursday. “They can’t buy food, they can’t buy groceries, they can’t do anything.”
Yet even shortly after inflation’s peak, the GOP underperformed in the 2022 midterms — suggesting voters didn’t believe that electing Republicans would slow the rise in prices. With each passing month, the case has weakened: In June 2023, the annual rate of inflation dropped to 3%, where it has hovered ever since. The consumer price index dropped 0.1% between May and June, the first month-to-month decline since the pandemic. Even mortgage rates — which are not included in inflation statistics but are a key cost for millions of prospective homebuyers and sellers — hit a 15-month low last week.
By itself, the declining rate of inflation might not be enough. Millions of Americans still struggle furiously to make ends meet. But Trump has further undermined his own party by refusing to walk back his calls for sweeping tariffs — 10% on all imports and 60% on Chinese-made goods. (He has even suggested using tariffs to replace income taxes.) Economists on both the left and right say these tariffs would only exacerbate inflation. Add it all together, and the GOP case on inflation has become as laughable as the idea that Trump has ever done his own grocery shopping.
Not since the early years of the Great Depression has news cut so uniformly against one party’s case for power. Republicans’ best hope was that the former president could win the same way he did in 2016: in spite of himself. With roughly three months to go, there’s still time for some news event to change matters, as Jim Comey’s letter did in 2016. But as of now, real-world trends won’t save Trump. Given his tenuous relationship to reality, that’s entirely appropriate.
