Trump Tests Midterm Message on Immigration, MS-13 ‘Animals’ During Campaign Rally

 NPR reports that President Trump spoke yesterday at a campaign rally in Tennessee and ramped up his rhetoric on illegal immigration and gang-related crimes. The president’s main goal with the Nashville event was to campaign for GOP Rep. Marsha Blackburn, who finds herself in a close Senate contest with former Democratic Gov. Phil Bredesen. “I’ve never heard of this guy — who is he?” Trump chided Bredesen. “He’s an absolute tool of Chuck Schumer, and of course the MS-13 lover Nancy Pelosi.” It was a new moniker for the House minority leader, and Trump doubled down on controversial comments he’d made earlier this month about the drug gang. “What was the name?” the president prodded the crowd, who yelled back “Animals!” “They’re not human beings,” Trump added, saying that they use “glaring loopholes in our immigration laws” in order “to infiltrate our country” and rape, murder and “cut people up into little pieces.”

On the U.S./Mexico border wall, the President that “in the end Mexico’s gonna pay for the wall,” implying it would be done via renegotiating the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA). “They’re gonna pay for the wall, and they’re going to enjoy it,” the president went on to claim. Mexican President Enrique Peña Nieto, however, had a very different response later via Twitter: 

President @realDonaldTrump: NO. Mexico will NEVER pay for a wall. Not now, not ever.

Sincerely, Mexico (all of us).

— Enrique Peña Nieto (@EPN) May 30, 2018

KJ