One late afternoon in mid-May, a half dozen Hispanic day laborers were paid $20 each to parade in front of the White House on camera, holding signs with slogans like “I Love Biden” and “I Need Work Permit for My Family.”

The stunt was orchestrated by Nick Shirley, a pro-Trump online influencer who often asks migrants on camera if they support Democratic President Joe Biden or think he made it easier for them to come to the U.S.

“We want to take you to the White House,” Shirley told the men he recruited at a Home Depot parking lot, where day laborers typically wait for jobs, in a video later posted to YouTube. “What (Biden) did for migrants is very kind, right? Letting everyone come in? So we are going to show him and say thank you.”

Shirley, a 22-year-old with more than 318,000 followers on social media, is among a new class of influencers supportive of Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump who are helping shape the immigration debate as the U.S. election campaign heats up.

Their self-shot dispatches from American cities and the southern border with Mexico portray migrants in the country illegally as dangerous and burdensome, and part of a plan to grow the ranks of Democratic voters.

  • @Drivebyhaiku
    1•6 months ago

    Democrats are bad at marketing because a lot of them come from the school of political jousting. It’s easy to lose touch with what the regular person believes politics is rather than the reality of the system where you can’t make solid promises because things can go very wrong and playing the game means setting up long term strategy where best case scenario you have to suck short term losses. They are mostly invested in long term preservation of the system so over promising and under delivering is a held fear. In vulgar terms it is shitting where ideologically eat.

    Republicans however basically promise the moon the sun and the stars and then when it doesn’t happen they just rile up their base with anti-federal sentiments to make them rabid. There’s no brakes on the anger machine which means there isn’t a cohesive long term strategy. It’s whatever does the job right here and now so they can as a group benefit off the short term gains. It’s why so many of them are individually crashing and burning. No exit strategy - just commitment to scalp what you can out of the system and ditch before you get consequences. They know they can basically say anything and get what they want.

    It’s a major FUBAR situation and Democrats are only now learning how to publicly perform a sense of political urgency.