Wading through the final dregs of the 2024 campaign, it appears a racist Louisiana congressman has demanded that the mythical dog-and-cat-eating, “vudu”-practicing Haitian immigrants from Springfield, Ohio, whom Donald Trump national television were made unclear, debate phase earlier this month: “They better get their minds in order and leave our country before January 20.” Or else. Under pressure from colleagues in the House of Representatives, Congressman Clay Higgins deleted the social media post on Wednesday. Hours later he told CNN that he still supported it: ‘It’s all true. . . . It doesn’t really matter to me. It’s like something is stuck to the bottom of my boot. Just scrape it off.” When asked about the controversy, House Speaker Mike Johnson called Higgins “a dear friend of mine” and a “very principled man.” As for the tweet, Johnson, a ostentatiously devout Christian, responded: “We are moving forward. We believe in redemption here.”

Outrage is an emotion that is impossible to sustain in this age of manufactured political outrage. I know; Higgins and Johnson probably know it too. They are indeed counting on it. Who will remember this particular piece of hate speech next week, when there will undoubtedly be so many newer, fresher acts of violence to get excited about? But still. Maybe take a moment to think about this one. While Democrats worry about the right level of policy detail needed to prove Kamala Harris’ fitness for president, Trump and his followers have delved deep into the racist recesses of the American psyche to wage a campaign that is intended to inflame their country’s passionate hatred and deepest insecurities. followers.

JD Vance recently made the mistake of publicly admitting the artifice inherent in this. In an interview with CNN’s Dana Bash, the Republican vice presidential candidate was asked about alleged Haitian pet consumption and why he and the former president kept pushing a story that had no basis in fact. “The American media completely ignored this stuff until Donald Trump and I started talking about cat memes,” he said. “If I have to create stories so that the American media actually pays attention to the suffering of the American people, then that’s what I’m going to do.” When Bash was shocked by his admission, Vance stepped back, but barely, claiming that he had in fact heard “first-hand accounts” from his constituents, thus spreading the rumor, let alone quickly debunked. “But,” he concluded, “yes, we created the real focus that allowed the American media to talk about this story and the suffering caused by Kamala Harris’ policies.”

Days of coverage followed about what he did or did not admit in the interview, losing the important point that this was not a “gotcha” story about a single errant statement from Vance, but a core belief underlying the MAGA approach to politics since Trump’s demagogic debut nine years ago. The jokes about Trump’s “they eat the dogs” debate line may have missed the point, which is that when the laughter goes away, the insults remain. This is how propaganda works. Ask Congressman Higgins.

I was reminded of this when I got a call from Fiona Hill, the National Security Council’s top assistant on Russia for much of Trump’s presidency. Hill told me she was stunned by the extent to which Vance’s defiant embrace of the radicalizing power of stories, whether true or not, aligned with the views of Vladimir Putin’s chief international propagandist, Russian state television personality Margarita Simonyan: effect, when we make things up? “I was really struck: RT and VT – Vance-Trump – are the same,” she said. “It’s the same weaponization of migration and disinformation.”

The episode reminded Hill of an incident early in Trump’s presidency, in November 2017, when Trump tweeted several incendiary videos from a British far-right group that claimed to show attacks carried out by Muslim immigrants. British officials contacted Hill and urged her to push the White House to have Trump delete his tweets and disown them. But, she said, when she brought the concerns to the White House press staff, then led by current Arkansas Gov. Sarah Huckabee Sanders, she was rebuffed. Hill was told that Trump was simply using the videos to further his domestic political agenda. When Sanders was subsequently asked by reporters about the tweets, her response was an eerie preview of Vance’s recent comments: “Whether or not it’s a real video,” she said, “the threat is real.”

Vance’s justification for the Springfield smear — that he was really making a point about “Kamala Harris’ policies” — is a reminder of another of the great lies driving this election: the charade that Trump is actually an ideological leader. MAGA warrior who engages in legitimate and substantive policy discussions, and that policy agenda makes him attractive to his otherwise unrepresented followers. This canard is one of the most persistent misconceptions we’ve heard from Republicans about Trump, a category error that fundamentally ignores what kind of politician he really is.

I was reminded of this often overlooked point while moderating a book launch for “The Origins of Elected Strongmen: How Personalist Parties Destroy Democracy from Within,” an important new academic work by Andrea Kendall-Taylor, a former official of the National intelligence agency covering Russia and Russia. Eurasia, and two academic colleagues, Erica Frantz and Joseph Wright. Their study places Trump in the international category to which he rightly belongs – that of an aspiring autocrat who has taken over the Republican Party and turned it into a “personalist” vehicle, the kind of party that, in the words of the authors, “exists” primarily to advance and advance the leader’s personal political career, rather than advancing policy.” This is now a global phenomenon, the authors found – from Brazil under Bolsonaro and Turkey under Erdoğan to less cited cases in El Salvador, Georgia, Poland, Senegal and Tunisia. Putin’s Russia is unfortunately the modern archetype, a template that goes back more than twenty years and that the others have followed.

Where does all this leave the non-MAGA Republican? We actually know the answer to this: They’re on their knees, still largely intent on voting the party line, averting their eyes, ignoring the insults, and pretending that Trump and his campaign are something other than what they are. Nikki Haley offered a pretty clear version of the contortions necessary for the hardcore Republican partisan who both hates Trump and votes for him anyway because of, well, policy. During the debut of Haley’s new Sirius She said she had not forgotten his campaign’s personal attacks on her — including apparently placing a birdcage outside her hotel room to emphasize his insult of her as a “birdbrain” — but that she was willing to overlook the insults now to see. , because ‘politics is not for the thin-skinned’ and she had to think about ‘the well-being of our country’. She then cited the economy, the border, national security and “freedom” as reasons why she would make such a sacrifice. Uh-huh.

To the extent that Trump promotes policies at all in 2024, his proposals largely revolve around one theme: He will wave his magic wand and make problems go away. At the Republican Convention in Milwaukee, he promised: “Under my plan, incomes will skyrocket, inflation will disappear completely, jobs will return quickly and the middle class will flourish like never before.” During his rallies, he promises to end the war in Ukraine “within twenty-four hours.” The Republicans’ all-caps political platform, which was approved at the Milwaukee Convention after being partly personally dictated by Trump, includes plans such as vows to “STOP THE MIGRANCIRIME EPIDEMIC” and “MAKE OUR COLLEGE CAMPUSES SAFE AND PATRIOTIC AGAIN .”

Earlier this week, Trump appeared in Georgia at a campaign rally billed as a policy rollout for his plans to usher in “a new era of American industrialism.” In between glorifying his proposed tariffs as a brilliant plan to “take other countries’ jobs,” Trump, the policy expert, questioned Harris’ intelligence and patriotism, attacking electric cars (except those manufactured by his supporter Elon Musk) and said that immigrants “come from all over the world” to ruin the country. Trump’s signature moment at this rally, as in other recent speeches, was when he shared what he had learned from the two assassination attempts against him: “People say it was God, and God came down and He saved you because He wants you to bring America back. back.” Do you still think this is about policy? Kamala Harris may need an eighty-two page economic plan printed on glossy paper, but Trump doesn’t. He was sent from heaven to save us. ♦