Philippa Kaur

The Apprentice – a new film dramatising Donald Trump’s business career during the 1970s and 80s – is the latest in a presidential election full of controversy.

The movie charts Trump’s (Sebastian Stan) professional rise from an awkward nobody to hotshot real-estate tycoon. Trump’s Pygmalion-like transformation is credited to his friendship with Roy Cohn (Jeremy Strong). Cohn was an infamous prosecutor who worked with Senator Joseph McCarthy during the Communist and Lavender (homosexual) scares, and as a political fixer for Richard Nixon.

The key storyline is that Trump becomes Cohn’s apprentice, learning underhanded ways of business and Machiavellian deal-making. Other figures said to have influenced Trump’s career, such as political adviser Roger Stone, get only cameos at best.

Trump does not look good. He is portrayed as vain, using amphetamines as diet pills and getting plastic surgery including liposuction and a scalp reduction. Trump rejects his alcoholic brother and later Cohn, who dies from AIDS in social disgrace.

Trump is also shown to rape his then-wife, Ivana (Maria Bakalova) – a scene which made headlines after the movie’s Cannes Film Festival premiere earlier this year. The rape claim was made during the couple’s divorce proceedings, although Ivana said afterwards that she did not consider the incident “rape” in a criminal sense.

Director Ali Abbasi says this depiction isn’t a take-down of the former president but a more nuanced exploration of Trump’s character. Indeed, there is sympathy for Trump – for example, by detailing the emotional pressure from his father.

The film explores how this experience fuelled Trump’s obsession with winning, which is cultivated by Cohn and his three rules of success: “attack, attack, attack”, “deny everything” and “never admit defeat”. The film seeks to get inside Trump’s mindset, not only as a businessperson, but unpicking what drove him in the White House, as well as the election he’s now fighting.

Some have criticised this approach for being too soft on Trump. A review in The Guardian called the film “obtuse and irrelevant”. A further concern is that presenting Trump as a “winner” could actually be seen to legitimise amoral business practices as successful, especially given that Trump’s later six bankruptcies are not clearly mentioned.

The Apprentice is also a deeper commentary on America. Another character comments that Cohn’s three rules also describe US foreign policy. The film raises big questions about the US, not least where Cohn repeatedly highlights what he identifies as the country’s virtues, and justifies his (sometimes illegal) actions as upholding these. The audience is left to consider what shapes America and its foreign policy – and what may be toxic about this.

Will the film influence the upcoming election?

The Apprentice’s screenwriter, Gabriel Sherman, insists the movie is not designed “to influence people’s minds”. Yet the film’s release so close to the polls means it is inevitably political.

The Apprentice is unlikely to radically shift the electoral needle. Trump’s negative portrayal may make some voters on the fence question his suitability for high office. But beyond this, the film will reinforce what people already thought.

Pro-Trumpers won’t like the movie, but this upset will likely just give oxygen to their support. Those against Trump will also be able to feel their opinion has been affirmed, even by those who would have wanted the film to take a harder line. Although it’s perhaps uncertain whether anyone who dislikes Trump will want to spend two hours watching even more of him than they already have in this election.

Jeremy Strong as Roy Cohn and Sebastian Stan as Donald Trump.
Everett Collection Inc/Alamy Stock Photo

While the film likely won’t influence the final outcome, it is still a major marker in this election thanks to the huge controversy around it. Concern over its divisive portrait of Trump meant the movie took five years to reach production. Clint Eastwood turned down the option to direct due to the perceived business risk involved. Distribution also took time to secure – a situation Abbasi describes as a “boycott or censorship”.

Distribution problems were also exacerbated by legal threats. After Cannes (where the film received an eight-minute ovation), Trump’s legal team issued a cease-and-desist letter. Communications Director for the Trump election campaign, Steven Cheung, said the film was “garbage” and “pure fiction”, constituting election interference.

Strong resistance also came from billionaire and close Trump associate, Dan Snyder, who was involved in the film’s financing, thinking it would paint a positive picture of the presidential hopeful. Snyder later sought to block the film’s release after seeing a preview.

Controversy has only raised the movie’s profile. And while people will watch it for very different political reasons, some will buy a ticket purely because this film is now a standout event in one of the most contentious US elections in history.

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Republican vice presidential candidate JD Vance infamously said in 2021 that the Democratic Party is run by “a bunch of childless cat ladies who are miserable at their own lives and the choices they’ve made” – and do not have a “direct stake” in the future of the United States.

Three years later, after Vance’s selection as Trump’s vice presidential pick, these comments resurfaced and quickly became a cultural touchstone.

In July 2024, Vance clarified his controversial comments, saying that what he meant was that the Democratic Party has become anti-family and anti-child.

At a September 2024 campaign event alongside Donald Trump, Arkansas Gov. Sarah Huckabee Sanders echoed Vance’s sentiments about Democrats being anti-family. “My kids keep me humble. Unfortunately, Kamala Harris doesn’t have anything keeping her humble,” she said.

The single cat lady theme was amplified further when singer Taylor Swift used it to sign off on her Instagram endorsement of Harris.

While the cat lady framing is new, politicians making parenthood and family a centerpiece in their appeals to the American public has a long history.

As we show in our 2012 book, “The Politics of Parenthood,” and subsequent research, politicians have been using messages about parenthood as a way to appeal to voters since the 1980s.

Content analysis of party platforms and speeches by presidential candidates reveals that both parties have devoted more and more time and space to making the case that they are the true pro-family party. Republicans argue that lower taxes and smaller government strengthen American families, while Democrats argue that strengthening social welfare programs represents the best way to support families.

Despite the parties’ contrasting pro-family messages and the image conjured by Vance’s childless cat lady comments, Republicans and Democrats are not really that different when it comes to their actual experiences having and raising children.

Our analysis shows that the age at which Americans have children, how many children they have and whether parents work outside the home are surprisingly similar across partisan lines.

A woman attends a CatCon event in Pasadena, Calif., in August 2024 and wears a ‘Childless cat ladies for Kamala’ shirt.
Genaro Molina/Los Angeles Times via Getty Images

Democrats and Republicans find parenting rewarding

To explore whether there are differences between Republicans and Democrats in terms of their families, we analyzed data from the 2022 General Social Survey, which had 4,149 respondents. GSS is a nationally representative and well recognized survey of American adults that has been conducted since 1972. We also analyzed data from a 2022 Pew survey of 3,757 mothers and fathers focused on parenting in America.

This data shows that both Republicans and Democrats deeply value their roles as parents. In the Pew survey, 87% of parents said that their role as a parent is the most important or one of the most important aspects of their identity. Our analysis shows this is true for parents in both parties – 86% of Democrats and 88% of Republicans said they value their role as parents as the most or one of the most important aspects of their identity.

Similarly, our analysis of the Pew data reveals that Democrats and Republicans both enjoy being parents – 84% of Republicans say they find parenting enjoyable most or all of the time, compared with 81% of Democrats.

That said, contemporary parenting is also challenging.

The 2022 Pew survey showed that 29% of parents describe raising children as stressful most or all of the time. And 42% of parents report that raising children is tiring all or most of the time. Our analysis shows that this is equally true for Republicans and Democrats.

Indeed, the stresses of modern parenthood led the U.S. surgeon general in August 2024 to issue a public health advisory about parents’ declining mental well-being.

One of the reasons for this stress is that most parents today are balancing parenthood with work. The Republican Party has long embraced “traditional marriage,” meaning a marriage between a man and a woman, where the mother stays home to raise the children. Yet the reality is that most moms have jobs outside the home. In our analysis of the 2022 Pew data, we find that about the same portion of Republican moms – 67% – work outside the home as Democratic moms, who totaled 69%.

Both Republican and Democratic moms do more parenting

Another way that the experience of parenthood is similar across partisan lines is that moms spend more time parenting than dads. Pew asked parents with partners and spouses about the division of labor around a variety of child care tasks in 2022.

In our analysis of the full set of this data, which Pew provided us, we found that 77% of Democratic mothers and 80% of Republican mothers report doing more than their spouse or partner when it comes to managing their children’s activities. And 60% of Democratic mothers and 58% of Republican mothers report providing more comfort and emotional support to their children than their spouses or partners do.

This may account for why the Pew data reveals that mothers, more so than fathers, report parenting being tiring most or all of the time – 47% for moms, compared with 34% for dads. Once again, our analysis shows that mothers’ higher levels of fatigue hold true for both Republican and Democratic mothers compared with Republican and Democratic dads.

To assess the demographics of parenthood, we analyzed the 2022 General Social Survey data and found that Republicans and Democrats start their families at a similar age, just as they did a decade ago.

On average, male and female Democrats are 26 when they have their first kid, while Republicans are 25. Higher levels of education are associated with starting families later, but this is true for those in both parties.

Looking at women specifically, we find that Democratic women have their first child at 25 years old, and Republican women at 24. There is no evidence that Democratic women – more so than Republican women – are delaying having children so that they can pursue their careers, as suggested by Vance and Sanders in their critiques of the Democratic Party and Harris specifically.

It is true that Americans are having fewer children compared with a few decades ago. But this drop in having children is nearly universal in high-income democracies, even despite some government policies that seek to increase the birth rate in the U.S.

Our analysis reveals that the gap between Republicans and Democrats on this issue is modest. On average, Democrats are having 1.53 children, compared with 1.86 for Republicans.

And the 2022 General Social Survey data shows that Democrats do report having no children at a modestly higher rate than Republicans, but it is men – more than women – who report being childless at higher rates. Among Americans over 40, 22% of Democratic men and 16% of Republican men have no kids, compared with 17% of Democratic women and 10% of Republican women.

Despite political rhetoric suggesting there is a deep partisan divide among Americans on issues of families and child-rearing, the data tells a different story. It paints a picture of Americans, whether Democrats or Republicans, as remarkably similar in the basic demographics of parenting, as well as in their views about the joys and challenges of parenthood. More

Though crime and criminal justice policy are central issues in many elections, that’s not true in 2024. Surveys show that relatively few American voters rank crime as their most important concern.

Yet both former President Donald Trump and Vice President Kamala Harris say they take those problems seriously. Trump and the Republicans have focused attention on the problem of illegal immigration and the crimes that he says immigrants commit.

Harris, as The Economist noted, “is using her history as a prosecutor in San Francisco to burnish her tough-on-crime bona fides.” She has mentioned that background in connection with immigration, drug policy and corporate wrongdoing.

As someone who studies crime and justice in the United States, it is clear to me that there are substantial differences between the two candidates, though each of their records contains some interesting twists and turns.

Kamala Harris gives her first news conference as attorney general of California in November 2010.
AP Photo/Damian Dovarganes

Kamala Harris, the prosecutor

Harris has a long record of working in the criminal justice system. She worked in the Alameda County district attorney’s office in California, starting in 1990, where she specialized in child sexual assault cases. She then served as district attorney in San Francisco from 2004 to 2010 and as attorney general of California from 2010 to 2017, when she was elected to the U.S. Senate.

Axios reported that during her term as district attorney, “the number of violent crimes rose steadily in the city of San Francisco during her first five years in office then fell 15% in her last two years.” And when she served as the state’s attorney general, “the violent crime rate in the state was 439.6 per 100,000 residents the year before she took office and fell to 396.4 by 2014. … However, violent crime surged to 444.8 in 2016 during her last year in office to a six-year high,” Axios reported.

In both offices, Harris undertook a number of reforms in criminal justice policy.

For example, in San Francisco she developed a “Back on Track” initiative“ that aimed to help nonviolent drug offenders between the ages of 18 and 30. According to The New York Times, its key promise was that ”after a full year of employment, education, community service, regular meetings with a supervising judge and crime-free behavior, the charge would be expunged from the offender’s record.“ It was generally well received, especially among progressives.

When Harris became the state’s attorney general, she reformed California’s approach to school truancy by focusing on the parents of truant children. As The New York Times reported, she threatened them ”with fines or even imprisonment if they did not ensure that their children attended class.“ FactCheck.org found that as a result of her policy, ”district attorneys reported prosecuting 3 to 6 … cases per year,“ on average.

Considering Harris’ record in California, The Desert Sun (Palm Springs, California) said Harris ”earned a reputation as tough on sexual abuse, human trafficking and organized crime, and did not shy away from pursuing incarceration.“

Throughout her career, Harris has been an opponent of the death penalty. During her first campaign for San Francisco district attorney, she promised that she would never seek a death sentence no matter how heinous the crime. She stuck to that promise, but as attorney general she went to court to defend death sentences that had been imposed under prior administrations.

The Los Angeles Times said her decision to do so was an appropriate one for the attorney general, ”putting professional responsibility over personal politics.“

CNN summarized her record on capital punishment by saying it ”broke hearts on both sides.“

Donald Trump speaks at a meeting about prison reform in 2018.
AP Photo/Carolyn Kaster

Donald Trump’s record as president

Trump, by contrast, was a strong proponent of the death penalty during his time in the Oval Office. In March 2018, he directed the Department of Justice to seek the death penalty in cases involving drug traffickers. The department also vigorously pursued new death penalty prosecutions in other areas and defended existing death sentences in court.

After a long time without any federal executions, the Trump administration carried out 13 of them in the last seven months of his term. ProPublica said Trump’s administration ”executed more federal prisoners than any presidency since Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s” and more than the prior 10 presidents combined.

In other areas, the Trump administration stepped in to stop some criminal justice reform initiatives. For example, according to ABC News, Trump’s first attorney general, Jeff Sessions, stopped former President Barack Obama’s effort to end prison privatization, and then began distributing contracts for new privately run detention centers.

But during his presidency, Trump was not consistent in being tough on crime. For instance, in March 2018, he signed an executive order creating the Federal Interagency Crime Prevention and Improving Reentry Council. He charged it with identifying ways “to provide those who have engaged in criminal activity with greater opportunities to lead productive lives” and to develop “a comprehensive strategy that addresses a range of issues, including mental health, vocational training, job creation, after-school programming, substance abuse, and mentoring.”

The Biden administration built on and extended those efforts.

And in December 2018, Trump supported the so-called “First Step Act,” which passed Congress with bipartisan support. It funded efforts to reduce the likelihood that inmates would be convicted again after their release, including by providing addiction treatment, mental health care, education and job training.

Trump also commuted the sentences of more than 90 people and pardoned more than 140 others. His use of clemency power was quite controversial, as some of its beneficiaries were Trump associates, such as Steve Bannon and Paul Manafort, who led Trump’s 2016 presidential campaign and had committed financial fraud.

As far as the crime rate during Trump’s presidency, the Dallas Morning News reported that “During the first three years of Trump’s presidency, the violent crime rate per 100,000 population … fell each year. But, the Morning News – citing Politifact – said that in 2020, “the violent crime rate spiked,” though it was slightly lower than it had been in Obama’s final year in office.

Crime and criminal justice in the next administration

The next president will have choices to make about the crime and justice policies that the federal government will pursue and about whether to emphasize reform or harsh punishment. He or she will also have to decide whether, and how, the federal government should use grants and other funding, guidelines and enforcement to further those goals.

Their records suggest that Harris and Trump would make very different choices about those and other crime and criminal justice issues. More

Donald Trump has a particular formula he uses to convey messages to his supporters and opponents alike: He highlights others’ wrongdoings even though he has committed similar acts himself.

On Oct. 3, 2024, Trump accused the Biden administration of spending Federal Emergency Management Agency funds – money meant for disaster relief – on services for immigrants. Biden did no such thing, but Trump did during his time in the White House, including to pay for additional detention space.

This is not the first time he has accused someone of something he had done or would do in the future. In 2016, Trump criticized opponent Hillary Clinton’s use of an unsecured personal email server while secretary of state as “extreme carelessness with classified material.” But once he was elected, Trump continued to use his unsecured personal cellphone while in office. And he has been criminally charged with illegally keeping classified government documents after he left office and storing them in his bedroom, bathroom and other places at his Mar-a-Lago estate.

After complaining about how Hillary Clinton handled classified documents, Donald Trump stored national secrets in a bathroom.
Justice Department via AP

More recently, the Secret Service arrested a man with a rifle who was allegedly planning to shoot Trump during a round of golf. In the wake of this event, Trump accused Democrats of using “inflammatory language” that stokes the fires of political violence. Meanwhile, Trump himself has a long history of making inflammatory remarks that could potentially incite violence.

As a scholar of both politics and psychology, I’m familiar with the psychological strategies candidates use to persuade the public to support them and to cast their rivals in a negative light. This strategy Trump has used repeatedly is called “projection.” It’s a tactic people use to lessen their own faults by calling out these faults in others.

Projection abounds

There are plenty of examples. During his Sept. 10, 2024, debate with Vice President Kamala Harris, Trump claimed that Democrats were responsible for the July 13 assassination attempt against him. “I probably took a bullet to the head because of the things that they say about me,” he declared.

Earlier in the debate he had falsely accused immigrants in Springfield, Ohio, of eating other people’s pets – a statement that sparked bomb threats and prompted the city’s mayor to declare a state of emergency.

Similarly, congressional investigators and federal prosecutors have found that Trump’s remarks called thousands of people to Washington, D.C., on Jan. 6, 2021, encouraging them to violently storm the Capitol in order to stop the counting of electoral votes.

Trump isn’t the only politician who uses projection. His running mate, JD Vance, claimed “the rejection of the American family is perhaps the most pernicious and the most evil thing the left has done in this country.” Critics quickly pointed out that his own family has a history of dysfunction and drug addiction.

Projection happens on both sides of the political aisle. In reference to Trump’s proposed 10% tariff on all imported goods, the Harris campaign launched social media efforts to condemn the so-called “Trump tequila tax.” While Harris frames this proposal as a sales tax that would devastate middle-class families, she deflects from the fact that inflation has made middle-class life more expensive since she and President Joe Biden took office.

How it works

Projection is one example of unconscious psychological processes called defense mechanisms. Some people find it hard to accept criticism or believe information that they wish were not true. So they seek – and then provide – another explanation for the difference between what’s happening in the world and what’s happening in their minds.

In general, this is called “motivated reasoning,” which is an umbrella phrase used to describe the array of mental gymnastics people use to reconcile their views with reality.

Some examples include seeking out information that confirms their beliefs, dismissing factual claims or creating alternate explanations. For example, a smoker might downplay or simply avoid information related to the link between smoking and lung cancer, or perhaps tell themselves that they don’t smoke as much as they actually do.

Motivated reasoning is not unique to politics. It can be a challenging concept to consider because people tend to think they are fully in control of their decision-making abilities and that they are capable of objectively processing political information. The evidence is clear, however, that there are unconscious thought processes at work, too.

Influencing the audience

Audiences are also susceptible to unconscious psychological dynamics. Research has found that over time, people’s minds subconsciously attach emotions to concepts, names or phrases. So someone might have a particular emotional reaction to the words “gun control,” “Ron DeSantis” or “tax relief.”

And people’s minds also unconsciously create defenses for those seemingly automatic emotions. When a person’s emotions and defenses are questioned, a phenomenon called the “backfire effect” can occur, in which the process of controlling, correcting or counteracting mistaken beliefs ends up reinforcing the person’s beliefs rather than changing them.

For instance, some people may find it hard to believe that the candidate they prefer – whom they believe to be the best person for the job – truly lost an election. So they seek another explanation and accept explanations that justify their beliefs. Perhaps they choose to believe, even in the absence of evidence, that the race was rigged or that many fraudulent votes were cast. And when evidence to the contrary is offered, they insist their views are correct.

Vice President Kamala Harris has campaigned with Liz Cheney, right, a prominent Republican who formerly served in Congress.
AP Photo/Mark Schiefelbein

A way out

Fortunately, research shows specific ways to reduce people’s reliance on these automatic psychological processes, including reiterating and providing details of objective facts and – importantly – attempting to correct untruths via a trusted source from the same political party.

For instance, challenges to Democrats’ belief that the Trump-affiliated conservative agenda called Project 2025 is “dangerous” would be more effective coming from a Democrat than from a Republican.

Similarly, a counter to Trump’s claim that the international community is headed toward World War III with Democrats in the White House would be stronger coming from one of Trump’s fellow Republicans. And certainly, statements that Trump “can never be trusted with power again” carries more weight when it comes from the lips of former Republican Vice President Dick Cheney than from any member of the Democratic Party.

Critiques from within a candidate’s own party are not out of the question. But they are certainly improbable given the hotly charged climate that is election season 2024. More

Political operatives on the far right have long spoken about their ambition to shift the “Overton window”. The aim is to “mainstream” ideas long considered unthinkable, through gradual, step-by-step radicalisation and repetition – especially on hot-button issues such as immigration, sexuality, race and identity.

If challenged, commentators respond by appealing to “free speech”, accusing their critics of denying this basic liberal right.

The career of former Fox News celebrity Tucker Carlson represents a case study in the success of this political strategy in the United States. As his recent interview with Holocaust revisionist Darryl Cooper highlights, the Overton window seems to have shifted so far that it now includes the extreme right in ways that were unthinkable as recently as a decade ago.

The interview on Carlson’s YouTube channel raises unsettling questions about the visions of history and politics all of this “free speech” is opening us towards, and how democratic debate could possibly be benefited by this process.

Careering free speech

Carlson has a history of promoting baseless claims. In late 2021, he exercised his freedom of speech by producing a three-part documentary alleging that the riot of Trump followers at the US Capitol on January 6 2021 was a “false flag” FBI operation, the true aim of which was to vilify the MAGA movement.

He has pushed COVID vaccine conspiracy theories and promoted the “great replacement” conspiracy theory on more than 400 shows. Long restricted to the extreme right fringe in Europe, this “theory” suggests that progressive elites in Western nations promote non-European immigration for their own political advantage, with the sinister ambition to “replace” the “white race”.

Carlson was ousted from Fox News in 2023, shortly after the cable network’s $787.5 million settlement with Dominion Voting Systems for spreading disinformation about the 2020 election. His own emails admitting Fox’s dishonesty were used as evidence in the case.

Then came 2024. In February, Carlson visited Russia, becoming the first Western journalist to interview President Vladimir Putin since the start of the Ukraine war. Carlson allowed Putin to air his rationalisations for Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, without any real challenge.

Aleksandr Dugin.
Duma.gov.ru via Wikimedia Commons, CC BY

Carlson then sat down for his YouTube channel with Russian neofascist Aleksandr Dugin. Dugin is a pro-Putin intellectual who was once fired from his academic position for urging his countrymen to “kill, kill, kill” their Ukrainian neighbours. He has expressed admiration for the Waffen SS – the most radical military arm of the Nazi SS – and decried the “Jewish elite”, which he proposes runs the US. In 1996, Dugin called for “an authentic, real, radically revolutionary and consistent fascism” in Russia, “borderless as our lands, and red as our blood”.

Shortly after his interview with Dugin, Carlson hosted Cooper, who proposed that British prime minister Winston Churchill, not Adolf Hitler, was the “chief villain” of World War II.

As for the Holocaust? Cooper challenged almost everything “mainstream” historians agree about Nazi atrocities. He claimed the Nazis’ hands were tied due to food shortages after Hitler invaded Soviet Russia. Since Churchill had refused to admit defeat after the fall of France in 1940, the Nazis were effectively blockaded. This left them with a choice between slowly starving the millions of “prisoners” their invasions bequeathed them and the more “humane” measure of “finishing them off quickly”.

These views, which have long circulated in neo-Nazi circles, are demonstrably false. They transparently serve to sanitise Hitler’s atrocities.

Bipartisan concerns

With his interview with Cooper, Carlson’s journey to the farthest reaches of the political right finally seems to have sparked bipartisan concern. Alongside condemnation from the White House, criticism came from some conservative lawmakers, including New York Republican Mike Lawler, who commented:

Platforming known Holocaust revisionists is deeply disturbing. During my time in the State Assembly, I worked with Democrats and Republicans to ensure all students in New York received proper education on the Holocaust, something Mr Cooper clearly never had.

Conservative political theorist Leo Strauss once opined that Weimar Germany collapsed because its liberal freedoms allowed Nazism, with its craven appeals to base hatreds, to proliferate. The shift of the Overton window in the US to include the far-right makes his warning newly unsettling.

Conservative theorist Leo Strauss in 1939.
Monozigote, via Wikimedia Commons, CC BY-SA

We have slowly arrived at a place where a commentator of enormous influence, who is close to a presidential candidate, is platforming a fan of Heinrich Himmler’s SS and neo-Nazi talking points.

The problem here is arguably not only that Carlson is hosting extremists such as Dugin and Cooper, but that he presents them to his many followers as courageous truth-tellers, whose views have been “forbidden” by censorious elites. He extolled Cooper as “the best and most honest popular historian in the United States”. Elon Musk posted on X in praise of Carlson’s interview, before quietly removing the post.

The same wide-eyed sympathy characterised Carlson’s exchanges with Putin and Dugin. Little wonder the latter celebrated his interview as a great tactical victory. Carlson had, in effect, given Dugin’s ideas an entrée into the US, from which Dugin himself remains banned.

To what end?

The pressing question all this raises is just what good can possibly come from opening the Overton window to ideas which generations of people since World War II have known to be toxic and incompatible with the political values of nations such as the US and Australia, which Carlson visited earlier this year.

In response to this question, formulaic outrage about the right to freely express any and all ideas, including the most hateful and patently false, really doesn’t cut it. In political scientist Robert O. Paxton’s definition, fascism is characterised by:

obsessive preoccupation with community decline, humiliation, or victimhood and by
compensatory cults of unity, energy and purity, in which a mass-based party of committed nationalist militants, working in uneasy but effective collaboration with traditional elites, abandons democratic liberties and pursues with redemptive violence and without ethical or legal restraints goals of internal cleansing and external expansion.

There is nothing in such a militant perspective consistent with the basic principles of democratic countries: social pluralism, the rule of law, multiparty politics with the peaceful transition of power, and the protected liberties of citizens – including freedom of speech.

Freedom of speech and its enemies

John Stuart Mill argued for freedom of speech on the grounds that the contest of opinions is needed to discover and share the truth. This classic liberal defence of free expression faces inescapable challenges, however, when it comes to the opinions of avowed enemies of “liberalism” such as Dugin and Cooper.

They are people who deride concerns about individual rights and protections. They assert the demands of the mythologised “ethnic community”. They conceive of politics as a war or struggle for domination.

Proponents of far-right views have, at best, a conditional interest in seeking the truth. Mill’s conception of a pluralistic public sphere of competing voices is anathema to them, if they attain power. They have no interest in fostering an independent-minded population capable of holding leaders to informed account.

The far right accepts the need to lie, suppress information and “strategically” present its position to different audiences. Such dishonesty is an instrument in the existential struggle. Its shameless deployment is a sign of strength and fidelity to the higher “truth” of the cause.

German philosopher Rainer Forst has studied the issues of free speech and toleration.
www.stephan-roehl.de, via Wikimedia Commons, CC BY-SA

All of this suggests deep “free speech” reasons for scepticism about the formulaic appeal to this liberal value being used to mainstream the ideas of Dugin and Cooper. Liberal democracies champion toleration. Yet as philosopher Rainer Forst has shown in a classic study, this toleration necessarily requires the clear-sightedness to identify, and the forthrightness to oppose, principled intolerance and the promotion of group hatred.

The time is surely past for the postwar complacency that far-right politics “could never happen again” in new forms. This is a time when a US vice-presidential candidate has happily shared a stage with Carlson after his Cooper interview.

The same candidate now owns his willingness to “create” stories about immigrants to spread fear and division before a national election whose results his party has again committed to challenging should they lose.

It is time to outspokenly defend democratic values and institutions against their foes, rather than let the disingenuous appeal to “free speech” be used to undermine them. More

It might seem surprising today in the era of Donald Trump, but Republicans in the United States once championed immigration and supported pathways to citizenship for undocumented Americans.

In January 1989, Ronald Reagan’s final speech as president was an impassioned ode to the immigrants who made America “a nation forever young, forever bursting with energy and new ideas”.

Contrast this with Trump, who has normalised dehumanising rhetoric and policies against immigrants. In this year’s presidential campaign, for instance, he has referred to undocumented immigrants as “animals” who are “poisoning the blood of our country”.

Both Trump and his vice presidential running mate, JD Vance, also repeated a false story about Haitian “illegal aliens” eating pets in Springfield, Ohio.

Perhaps most troubling, Trump has pledged to launch “the largest deportation operation in the history of our country”, if he’s elected.

Immigration policies throughout history

Nativism, or anti-immigrant sentiment, has a long history in American politics.

In 1924, a highly restrictive immigration quota system based on racial and national origins was introduced. This law envisaged America as a white, Anglo-Saxon, Protestant nation.

However, there was no restriction on immigrants from the Western Hemisphere. The agricultural and railroad sectors relied heavily on workers from Mexico.

In 1965, the quota system was replaced by visa preference categories for family and employment-based migrants, along with refugee and asylum slots.

Then, as violence and economic instability spread across Central America in the 1970s, there was a surge in undocumented immigration to the US.

Scholar Leo Chavez argues that in the late 1980s and early 1990s, an alarmist “Latino threat narrative” became the dominant motif in media discussions of immigration.

This narrative was frequently driven by Republican politicians in states on the US-Mexico border, who derived electoral advantage from amplifying voter anxieties.

The growing popularity of this negative discourse coincided with a significant increase in income inequality – a byproduct of neo-liberal policies championed by Reagan and other Republicans.

Read more:
Before Trump, there was a long history of race-baiting, fear-mongering and building walls on the US-Mexico border

A dramatic shift in Republican rhetoric

In the early-to-mid 20th century, Democrats were often the party that supported restrictive immigration and border policies.

However, most Republicans at the national level – strongly supported by business – tended to endorse policies that encouraged the easy flow of workers across the border and increased levels of legal immigration.

Prominent conservative Republicans also rejected vilifying rhetoric towards undocumented Americans. They presented all immigrants as pursuing opportunities for their families, a framing that emphasised a shared vision of the American dream. In this telling, their labour contributed to the economy and America’s growth and prosperity.

George H. W. Bush And Ronald Reagan debate immigration in a Republican primary debate in 1980.

Reagan, the most influential conservative of the late 20th century, opposed erecting a border wall and supported amnesty over deportation.

Reagan also strongly supported bipartisan immigration reform. In 1986, Congress passed an immigration act that increased border security funding, but also ensured 2.7 million undocumented immigrants, primarily of Latino background, were able to gain legal status.

Twenty years later, President George W. Bush and Republican Senator John McCain lobbied for a bipartisan bill that would have tightened border enforcement while simultaneously “legalising” an estimated 12 million undocumented immigrants. It was narrowly defeated.

This vocal support for immigrants by leading Republicans was striking because for much of the period between the late 1980s and the early 2000s, a majority of Americans actually wanted immigration levels reduced.

Then, around 2009, a dramatic shift in political rhetoric took place. The Tea Party movement brought border security and “racial resentment” towards immigrants centre stage, challenging conservative Republicans from the populist right.

Supporters of a controversial new law in Arizona in 2010 that made it a crime under state law to be in the country illegally.
Ross D. Franklin/AP

As a result, more and more Republicans began to voice restrictionist and xenophobic rhetoric and support legislation aimed at cracking down on illegal immigration.

What’s surprising, though, is the number of undocumented immigrants in the US was actually declining at this time, from 12.2 million in 2007 to 10.7 million in 2016.

Donald Trump and the new nativism

In this worsening anti-immigrant climate, Trump descended a golden escalator in mid-2015 to launch his presidential campaign.

In his speech that day, immigration was front and centre. Trump vowed to “build a great wall” and accused Mexico of sending “rapists” and “criminals” to America.

His speeches during the presidential campaign were marked by frequent anti-Mexican assertions and calls for Islamophobic visa policies. This hostile stance on immigration was central to his victory in both the Republican primaries and the general election against Hillary Clinton.

Once in office, Trump then adopted a “zero tolerance” stance towards undocumented immigration. His administration pursued a heartrending family separation policy that split children and their undocumented parents at the border. This approach was celebrated on conservative media outlets such as Fox News.

During his presidency, he also reduced legal immigration by almost half, drastically cut America’s refugee intake, and introduced bans on people from Muslim-majority countries.

Policy expert David Bier concluded the goal of Republican lawmakers had shifted:

It really looks like the entire debate about illegality is not the main issue anymore for Republicans in both chambers of Congress. The main goal seems to be to reduce the number of foreigners in the United States to the greatest extent possible.

Indeed, Trump’s vision of the nation had overtly racial overtones.

In one 2018 meeting, he asked why America should accept immigrants from “shithole countries” like Haiti, El Salvador or the African continent. His preference was for Norwegian migrants.

Immigration as a major election theme

From 2021–2023, undocumented US-Mexico border crossings surged due to natural disasters, economic downturns and violence in many Latin American and Caribbean nations. Many of the recent arrivals are asylum seekers.

Though the numbers have fallen sharply in 2024, immigration and the border are still one of the top issues for voters across the political spectrum. The issue is particularly important in the key swing state of Arizona.

In 2024, Trump’s central immigration promise was encapsulated by the beaming delegates waving signs calling for “Mass Deportations Now” at the Republican National Convention.

The Trump-Vance ticket has blamed undocumented immigrants for almost every economic and social problem imaginable. The two candidates present them as a dangerous and subversive “other” that cannot be assimilated into mainstream American culture.

Yet Trump, as both president and candidate, has worked to prevent the passage of border security legislation. Turmoil on the border benefits him.

And his nativism now encompasses all forms of immigration – he has pledged to curb legal channels for people to enter the country, as well.

All of this rhetoric has had a dramatic impact on public opinion. Between 2016 and 2024, the number of people supporting the deportation of undocumented immigrants jumped from 32% to 47%.

In July 2024, 55% of Americans also said they wanted to see immigration levels decrease, a 14-point increase in one year.

Many Americans do not perceive immigration as a source of vitality and renewal as they had in the past. Instead, reflecting Trump’s language, they are viewing immigrants as an existential threat to the country’s future. More

It might seem surprising today in the era of Donald Trump, but Republicans in the United States once championed immigration and supported pathways to citizenship for undocumented Americans.

In January 1989, Ronald Reagan’s final speech as president was an impassioned ode to the immigrants who made America “a nation forever young, forever bursting with energy and new ideas”.

Contrast this with Trump, who has normalised dehumanising rhetoric and policies against immigrants. In this year’s presidential campaign, for instance, he has referred to undocumented immigrants as “animals” who are “poisoning the blood of our country”.

Both Trump and his vice presidential running mate, JD Vance, also repeated a false story about Haitian “illegal aliens” eating pets in Springfield, Ohio.

Perhaps most troubling, Trump has pledged to launch “the largest deportation operation in the history of our country”, if he’s elected.

Immigration policies throughout history

Nativism, or anti-immigrant sentiment, has a long history in American politics.

In 1924, a highly restrictive immigration quota system based on racial and national origins was introduced. This law envisaged America as a white, Anglo-Saxon, Protestant nation.

However, there was no restriction on immigrants from the Western Hemisphere. The agricultural and railroad sectors relied heavily on workers from Mexico.

In 1965, the quota system was replaced by visa preference categories for family and employment-based migrants, along with refugee and asylum slots.

Then, as violence and economic instability spread across Central America in the 1970s, there was a surge in undocumented immigration to the US.

Scholar Leo Chavez argues that in the late 1980s and early 1990s, an alarmist “Latino threat narrative” became the dominant motif in media discussions of immigration.

This narrative was frequently driven by Republican politicians in states on the US-Mexico border, who derived electoral advantage from amplifying voter anxieties.

The growing popularity of this negative discourse coincided with a significant increase in income inequality – a byproduct of neo-liberal policies championed by Reagan and other Republicans.

Read more:
Before Trump, there was a long history of race-baiting, fear-mongering and building walls on the US-Mexico border

A dramatic shift in Republican rhetoric

In the early-to-mid 20th century, Democrats were often the party that supported restrictive immigration and border policies.

However, most Republicans at the national level – strongly supported by business – tended to endorse policies that encouraged the easy flow of workers across the border and increased levels of legal immigration.

Prominent conservative Republicans also rejected vilifying rhetoric towards undocumented Americans. They presented all immigrants as pursuing opportunities for their families, a framing that emphasised a shared vision of the American dream. In this telling, their labour contributed to the economy and America’s growth and prosperity.

George H. W. Bush And Ronald Reagan debate immigration in a Republican primary debate in 1980.

Reagan, the most influential conservative of the late 20th century, opposed erecting a border wall and supported amnesty over deportation.

Reagan also strongly supported bipartisan immigration reform. In 1986, Congress passed an immigration act that increased border security funding, but also ensured 2.7 million undocumented immigrants, primarily of Latino background, were able to gain legal status.

Twenty years later, President George W. Bush and Republican Senator John McCain lobbied for a bipartisan bill that would have tightened border enforcement while simultaneously “legalising” an estimated 12 million undocumented immigrants. It was narrowly defeated.

This vocal support for immigrants by leading Republicans was striking because for much of the period between the late 1980s and the early 2000s, a majority of Americans actually wanted immigration levels reduced.

Then, around 2009, a dramatic shift in political rhetoric took place. The Tea Party movement brought border security and “racial resentment” towards immigrants centre stage, challenging conservative Republicans from the populist right.

Supporters of a controversial new law in Arizona in 2010 that made it a crime under state law to be in the country illegally.
Ross D. Franklin/AP

As a result, more and more Republicans began to voice restrictionist and xenophobic rhetoric and support legislation aimed at cracking down on illegal immigration.

What’s surprising, though, is the number of undocumented immigrants in the US was actually declining at this time, from 12.2 million in 2007 to 10.7 million in 2016.

Donald Trump and the new nativism

In this worsening anti-immigrant climate, Trump descended a golden escalator in mid-2015 to launch his presidential campaign.

In his speech that day, immigration was front and centre. Trump vowed to “build a great wall” and accused Mexico of sending “rapists” and “criminals” to America.

His speeches during the presidential campaign were marked by frequent anti-Mexican assertions and calls for Islamophobic visa policies. This hostile stance on immigration was central to his victory in both the Republican primaries and the general election against Hillary Clinton.

Once in office, Trump then adopted a “zero tolerance” stance towards undocumented immigration. His administration pursued a heartrending family separation policy that split children and their undocumented parents at the border. This approach was celebrated on conservative media outlets such as Fox News.

During his presidency, he also reduced legal immigration by almost half, drastically cut America’s refugee intake, and introduced bans on people from Muslim-majority countries.

Policy expert David Bier concluded the goal of Republican lawmakers had shifted:

It really looks like the entire debate about illegality is not the main issue anymore for Republicans in both chambers of Congress. The main goal seems to be to reduce the number of foreigners in the United States to the greatest extent possible.

Indeed, Trump’s vision of the nation had overtly racial overtones.

In one 2018 meeting, he asked why America should accept immigrants from “shithole countries” like Haiti, El Salvador or the African continent. His preference was for Norwegian migrants.

Immigration as a major election theme

From 2021–2023, undocumented US-Mexico border crossings surged due to natural disasters, economic downturns and violence in many Latin American and Caribbean nations. Many of the recent arrivals are asylum seekers.

Though the numbers have fallen sharply in 2024, immigration and the border are still one of the top issues for voters across the political spectrum. The issue is particularly important in the key swing state of Arizona.

In 2024, Trump’s central immigration promise was encapsulated by the beaming delegates waving signs calling for “Mass Deportations Now” at the Republican National Convention.

The Trump-Vance ticket has blamed undocumented immigrants for almost every economic and social problem imaginable. The two candidates present them as a dangerous and subversive “other” that cannot be assimilated into mainstream American culture.

Yet Trump, as both president and candidate, has worked to prevent the passage of border security legislation. Turmoil on the border benefits him.

And his nativism now encompasses all forms of immigration – he has pledged to curb legal channels for people to enter the country, as well.

All of this rhetoric has had a dramatic impact on public opinion. Between 2016 and 2024, the number of people supporting the deportation of undocumented immigrants jumped from 32% to 47%.

In July 2024, 55% of Americans also said they wanted to see immigration levels decrease, a 14-point increase in one year.

Many Americans do not perceive immigration as a source of vitality and renewal as they had in the past. Instead, reflecting Trump’s language, they are viewing immigrants as an existential threat to the country’s future. More

In one of the most memorable moments of the current presidential campaign, Donald Trump in July 2024 contended that Democratic nominee Kamala Harris recently stopped identifying as Indian and “happened to turn Black.”

With these false remarks, Trump implied that Harris emphasized one part of her background to appeal to voters and then changed that to appeal to a different group of voters.

Lost within this controversy has been the underlying assumption in Trump’s comments, that people tend to vote for someone with a shared identity. But is that true? Are Asian Americans, for example, especially likely to vote for Harris because of their shared identity?

Asian Americans are a quickly growing political constituency that made a difference in 2020 in swing states such as Georgia, Nevada and Arizona, helping elect President Joe Biden. They are positioned to be influential again this November.

Taken as a whole, Asian Americans lean Democratic in 2024, with 62% favoring Harris, compared with 38% who support Trump. But for Harris, Asian Americans are not as strong a voting bloc as Black Americans, who poll at 77% supporting Harris, according to the Pew Research Center. Harris cannot take Asian Americans’ votes for granted.

Kamala Harris takes a photo with guests during a White House reception in May 2022 celebrating Asian American, Native Hawaiian and Pacific Islander Heritage Month.
Associated Press

What guides identity politics and voting

Despite the assumption in Trump’s comments that voters gravitate toward a political candidate who shares parts of their identity, such as race or gender, that is not always the case.

Voters are more likely to vote for someone with a shared identity when they see a “linked fate.” with the candidate. So, people who have the same ethnicity or race may vote in a similar fashion because they expect to experience the effects of policy changes in the same way. Latinos could be more likely to vote for a Latino candidate because the candidate would prioritize issues that matter to them, such as immigration reform.

Politicians, for their part, can try to encourage people with whom they share an identity to believe in a linked fate to win their vote. In order to do this, candidates can play up issues that affect their identity group and then make the case that they are best equipped and more motivated to address those problems.

For instance, women rank abortion rights as a key issue and trust Harris to understand it.

In order to earn voters’ support, candidates must also come across as likely to act in their supporters’ shared interests. This helps explain why people who care about so-called women’s issues, such as education or health care, are more likely to vote for a Democratic woman than a Republican woman. People generally think that Democrats represent women better than Republicans do – and they would not assume that a Republican female politician would champion women’s issues just because of her gender.

With this in mind, a candidate wanting to secure the vote of a group must first know what issues matter to them and then demonstrate that they understand the group well enough to earn their vote.

Asian Americans, like most Americans, list the economy, inflation, health care, crime, Social Security, the price of housing and immigration as their top issues in this election.

In order to effectively appeal to Asian American voters, Harris could demonstrate first that she identifies as Asian in order to invoke their shared identity. She could also show that she both understands the issues that Asian Americans care about and that she can be trusted to act in ways they favor on those issues.

To an extent, Harris has already worked to publicly identify with her South Asian heritage. She has referred to her mother’s immigrant background and has talked about her grandfather who lived in Chennai, in southern India. She has made references to her ethnic culture, such as when she mentioned coconut trees and cooked the traditional South Indian dish dosa in a video with fellow Indian American Mindy Kaling.

New Hampshire delegate Sumathi Madhure attends the Democratic National Convention on Aug. 19, 2024.
Robert Gauthier/Los Angeles Times via Getty Images

Connecting to Asian Americans

Once solidifying that they share an identity with a group of voters, political candidates must demonstrate that they understand how the group experiences the issues that matter to them. The concerns of Asian Americans arise out of specific experiences they have – such as immigration.

Asian Americans, for example, often complain about the long wait to sponsor family members abroad for visas to the U.S. At the same time, Asian Americans represent 15% of immigrants living in the U.S. without a visa.

Asian Americans are also concerned about the growing government backlog of visas and smugglers whom immigrants pay to help them illegally cross the border.

Harris often speaks about immigration and the U.S.-Mexico border, but not in personal terms – or about how this issue specifically relates to Asians.

While all U.S. residents are affected by inflation, small-business owners, in particular, feel the pinch. They must pay higher prices for goods but have limited capital with which to do so. They also must navigate higher interest rates.

While Asian Americans make up about 7% of the total U.S. population, they represent 10% of business owners and are the largest nonwhite group of small-business owners.

Harris talks about the economy and inflation, as well as the need to support small-business owners, but not about how these issues specifically affect Asian Americans. Her only ad targeting Asian Americans has focused on hate crimes against them.

And Asian Americans, like most voters, strongly support Social Security and other federal programs that aim to ensure stability for the elderly. Harris could speak of how Social Security is the sole income source for over a quarter of Asian Americans – and for a third of African Americans – compared with 18% of white Americans.

Harris seems poised to capture the majority of the Asian American vote, which leans Democratic. But to what extent they vote for her – and with how much enthusiasm – will depend on Harris’ ability to connect with them as Asian Americans and the issues they care about. More