Donald J. Trump turned his back to the crowd and stared up at the screen. Ominous music rang out. For the next minute and a half, the former president and his audience in Atlanta stood and silently watched clips of news reports of undocumented immigrants committing horrific crimes.
When the montage ended, Mr. Trump said out loud what he has been telling his advisers in private for weeks: that, in his view, immigration is the “No. 1” issue in the 2024 election.
“That beats out the economy. That beats it all out to me, it’s not even close,” Mr. Trump said of the immigration issue, after playing the video on Tuesday night. “The United States is now an occupied country. But on Nov. 5, 2024, that will be liberation day in America.”
In the final weeks of a campaign that the former president has been waging more or less since his first year out of office, Mr. Trump is going with his gut, doubling down on the rhetoric that he believes won him the 2016 election and using immigration and the border to form the core of his closing message to voters.
Those instincts are at odds with the data, and with some of his advisers.
Mr. Trump has told aides that he beat Hillary Clinton in 2016 with the border but that in 2020 the border was “fixed” — illegal crossings had dropped to a dramatic low in part because of the coronavirus pandemic — so he could not use it as an issue against Joseph R. Biden Jr. He thinks immigration is more potent than ever as a political message, after the record levels of border crossings under the Biden-Harris administration and after he helped kill a bipartisan border security bill that the administration tried to pass.
But neither public nor private surveys support Mr. Trump’s theory of the race. Voters frequently rank the economy and the high cost of living as their most important issue.
