Why Trump’s Sarah Root scare story is a smart political play—unfortunately

The image of a minority boogeyman, freely roaming the streets and terrorizing white women, has worked in presidential campaigns before. Why not now?

Railing against “illegal immigrants with criminal records” last night, Donald Trump went anecdotal. “They are being released by the tens of thousands into our communities,” he said. “One such border-crosser was released and made his way to Nebraska. There, he ended the life of an innocent young girl named Sarah Root.” Root, a white 21-year-old college graduate, was a “sacrifice on the altar of open borders.”

In other words, Trump is pulling a Willie Horton.

Horton was a huge star of the 1988 Bush v. Dukakis presidential race. A black convicted murderer who was locked up in Massachusetts in 1974, Horton had been allowed a weekend furlough in 1986, from which he didn’t return. Instead, he raped a white woman in Maryland, was recaptured, and went back to jail for life.

Because Democratic nominee Michael Dukakis had been governor of Massachusetts, George H. W. Bush’s campaign artfully pinned the Horton fiasco on him. “By the time we’re finished,” said Bush’s cutthroat campaign manager Lee Atwater, “they’re going to wonder whether Willie Horton is Dukakis’ running mate.”

By 1988, with the inner-city drug-crime wave nearing full force, it seemed to many that the nation was growing perilously unsafe. That year saw spikes in rapes, robberies, aggravated assault, and murders, with violent crime overall rising 5.5%. “Tough on crime” was the new look for politicians, and smearing an opponent as insufficiently punitive was a clear path to victory.

“Bush supports the death penalty,” ran a famous Bush campaign ad in fall of ’88. “Dukakis not only opposes the death penalty, he allowed first degree murderers to have weekend passes from prison. One was Willie Horton.” Another ad referred to Dukakis’s “revolving door prison policy,” and featured a black man making menacing eye contact.

The ads were made by a group that included former employees of Roger Ailes, the Fox News executive who resigned this week following sexual assault allegations. Ailes himself reportedly had a hand in the ad, telling Time Magazine, “The only question is whether we depict Willie Horton with a knife in his hand or without it.”

“That ad alone changed the course of that race,” said Democratic strategist Jimmy Williams. “It made white Americans — especially white southerners — raise and eyebrow and think, ‘We can’t have a man from Massachusetts releasing quote black criminals all across the country and letting them rape our white women and children.’ That was the point of that ad.”

With the Sarah Root story, Trump is aiming for the Horton effect. It’s a scaremongering tactic intended to terrify white America at the prospect of criminal non-white immigrants threatening our safety. It’s an anecdotal extension of his infamous early-campaign line: “When Mexico sends its people, they’re not sending their best… They’re bringing drugs. They’re bringing crime. They’re rapists.” And they’re killers, too.

However, Eswin Mejia, Sarah Root’s killer, wasn’t a rapist or a vicious premeditated murderer — his charge was manslaughter. Root was killed in a drunk driving incident. Mejia was released on $5,000 bail because he was a minor without a significant criminal record. Once out, he fled to avoid prosecution. Tragic and inexcusable as the case is, it’s a fairly straightforward drunk-driving and bail-jumping incident, one that has little to do with Mejia’s citizenship status.

But to hear Trump tell it, Mejia is an imminent threat to our lives, allowed to roam free because America is not tough enough on immigration. Only under President Trump, who proposes deporting all 11 million undocumented immigrants in the United States, would we be safe.

At least that’s the narrative he’s peddling.