Trump Makes Chilling Promise in Pre-Debate Phone Call

Donald Trump made an alarming promise to his conservative Christian supporters ahead of Tuesday’s presidential debate.

During a pre-debate prayer call hosted by the National Faith Advisory Board on Monday evening, Trump whined that Kamala Harris wanted to naturalize undocumented immigrants, and claimed that it would come at a steep cost to one group in particular.

“Every day she is flooding our country with millions and millions of illegal aliens. She wants to make them citizens, she wants to have them vote,” Trump said .* “Which will destroy the voting powers of Christian conservatives forever.”

“There is no more, and there should be no more important voice than the voice of Christians,” Trump said.

Trump is attempting to set up a false exchange: that the power of one group would diminish the power of another. And in the fascist tradition, he is using immigrants as a scapegoat.

While Trump would like Christian conservatives to feel that their voices are the most important to him, the Republican nominee has repeatedly sidestepped some of the policies they’ve advocated, in an attempt to widen his appeal ahead of the election.

With Trump’s pushing, the Republican Party completely abandoned its commitment to a federal abortion ban, a longtime project of the Christian right. While Trump’s current abortion policy stance still allows for the passage of the highly restrictive laws, his blatantly opportunistic shilling should not go unnoticed. To Trump, there is no voice more important than his own.

This isn’t the first time that Trump has made an unsettling comment directed at his Christian conservative base. The former president previously promised his Christian supporters that after voting for him in November, they would never need to vote again.

“You won’t have to do it anymore. Four more years, you know what? It’ll be fixed, it’ll be fine. You won’t have to vote anymore, my beautiful Christians,” Trump said at Turning Point Action’s Believers’ Summit in July.

When asked to explain the statement, he claimed that he was trying to motivate Christians, who rarely participate in elections—which is completely untrue.

* This story originally misquoted the number Trump says.