The polls are saying the economy and the cost of living are the most important factors in this year’s election, but former President Donald Trump strongly disagrees: The main issue now, like when he won in 2016, is immigration. 

“That beats out the economy,” Trump said at a recent rally in Atlanta, after playing a video for his audience featuring news clips detailing reports of immigrants who have committed crimes against Americans, reports The New York Times Saturday. “That beats it all out to me; it’s not even close.”

Trump has been telling aides that he defeated Hillary Clinton in 2016 by focusing on the border, as he’s amped up his warnings and threats on the issue. 

According to sources, Trump says he couldn’t use the border as his campaign fight in 2020 against Joe Biden, because by that point he’d been in office for four years and the problem was “fixed.”

But now, there have been record levels of border crossings under Biden and Vice President Kamala Harris, Trump’s rival for the White House, and he has been using that as ammunition in his campaigns and interviews, even when the topic being discussed is the economy. 

During his rallies, Trump finds that he gets more response from his audience when he starts talking about immigration, and the press also tends to cover his remarks more than it does when he threatens stronger tariffs, such as during his interview before the Economic Club of Chicago this past week. 

A person close to Trump also told The Post that he thinks his crowds are “bored” when he talks about the economy. Further, he tells rally audiences and people close to him that his focus on immigration saved his life from a would-be assassin’s bullet in Butler, Pennyslvania, this summer. 

Trump had turned his head to talk about a chart concerning illegal border crossings when a shot fired by Thomas Crooks missed his skull and instead grazed his ear. 

“If you think about it, illegal immigration saved my life — I’m the only one,” Trump said at a rally in Aurora, Colorado. “Usually it’s the opposite.”

Some of Trump’s allies back his push on immigration as a top issue, but other allies are concerned that some extreme rhetoric, like claims that Haitian immigrants are eating pets in Springfield, Ohio, will push away moderate voters. 

Trump has insisted he wants to speak in Springfield, where the immigrants are in the country legally under a program that allowed them to flee violence in Haiti. 

But with threats growing in the city’s schools, local Republicans have asked Trump to stay away. While he promised as recently as this week that he plans to visit the Ohio community, no date has been announced. 

Instead, Trump traveled to Aurora, whose mayor has said the former president is exaggerating the dangers of Venezuelan gangs in some of the city’s apartment complexes. 

In Aurora, Trump said he wants to use the Alien Enemies Act, the law that was used during World War II to imprison people of Japanese descent in internment camps, to deport the gang leaders. 

Meanwhile, Trump also brings his talking points back to immigration, including when the New York Times asked his campaign for plans to lower the cost of housing. He responded that deporting immigrants would increase the housing supply and reduce costs. 

Trump spokesman Brian Hughes said the former president “rightfully recognizes that Kamala Harris’s porous border is at the heart of so many issues,” and that an open border wastes taxpayer dollars. 

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