Looking at the latest debris from the 2024 campaign, it appears that a racist congressman from Louisiana has demanded that Donald Trump’s mythical, dog- and cat-eating, “Vudu”-practicing Haitian immigrants from Springfield, Ohio, be nationally represented Level debate stage earlier this month: “It is better to clarify them before January 20 and leave our country.” Or else. After pressure from colleagues in the House of Representatives, Congressman Clay Higgins deleted the social media post on Wednesday. Then, hours later, he told CNN that he still stood by it: “It’s all true. . . . For me it’s not a big deal. It’s like something is stuck to the bottom of my boot. Just scrape it off.” Asked about the controversy, House Speaker Mike Johnson called Higgins “a dear friend of mine” and a “very principled man.” Johnson, a demonstratively devout Christian, responded to the tweet: “We’re moving forward. We believe in salvation here.”

In this age of manufactured political outrage, outrage is an emotion that cannot be sustained. I know it; Higgins and Johnson certainly know it too. In fact, they expect it. Who will remember this particular hate speech next week when there will undoubtedly be so many newer, fresher crimes to be outraged about? But still. Maybe pause for a minute. As Democrats agonize over what policy details are needed to prove Kamala Harris’s suitability for the presidency, Trump and his supporters have delved deep into the racist depths of the American psyche to launch a campaign that… intended to stir up passionate hatred and the deepest insecurities of its population.

JD Vance recently made the mistake of publicly admitting that all of this is a work of art. In an interview with CNN’s Dana Bash, the Republican vice presidential candidate was asked about the alleged consumption of pets in Haiti 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 make up stories so that the American media will actually pay attention to the suffering of the American people, then I will.” When Bash expressed shock at his admission, Vance backed down curtly, claiming that he actually had “reports “heard it firsthand” from his constituents, which led him to spread the rumor, not to mention they were 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 didn’t admit in the interview, missing the important point that this wasn’t a “gotcha” story about a single erroneous statement from Vance, but rather a core belief underlying it lay MAGA approach to politics since Trump’s demagogic debut nine years ago. The jokes about Trump’s debate line “They eat the dogs” may be missing the point, which is that when the laughter dies down, the insults remain. This is how propaganda works. Ask Congressman Higgins.

I was reminded of this when I received a call from Fiona Hill, the National Security Council’s top adviser on Russia for much of Trump’s presidency. Hill told me she was struck by how closely Vance’s defiant embrace of the radicalizing power of stories, true or not, resembled the views of Vladimir Putin’s chief international propagandist, Russian state television personality Margarita Simonyan: So what? when we make things up? “I was really impressed: RT and VT — Vance-Trump — are the same thing,” she said. “It’s the same weapon that uses migration and disinformation.”

The episode reminded Hill of an incident early in Trump’s presidency in November 2017, when Trump tweeted several inflammatory videos from a far-right British group that purportedly showed attacks by Muslim immigrants. British officials contacted Hill and urged her to get the White House to have Trump remove his tweets and disavow them. But when she brought her concerns to the White House press staff, then led by current Arkansas Gov. Sarah Huckabee Sanders, she was rebuffed, she said. Hill was told that Trump was simply using the videos to advance his domestic agenda. Then, when Sanders was asked by reporters about the tweets, her response was an eerie preview of Vance’s recent comments: “Whether it’s a real video,” she said, “the threat is real.”

Vance’s justification for denigrating Springfield – that he was really invoking the “politics of Kamala Harris” – is reminiscent of another big lie underlying this election: the farce that Trump is actually an ideologue MAGA Warrior engaging in a legitimate and substantive political dispute, and that this political agenda is what makes him attractive to his otherwise unrepresented supporters. That disappointment was one of the most persistent fallacies we’ve heard from Republicans about Trump, a category error that fundamentally misses what kind of politician he really is.

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

Where does all this lead to non-MAGA Republican? We actually know the answer to that question: They’re hunkered down, still mostly planning to vote the party line, averting their gaze, ignoring the insults, and acting as if Trump and his campaign are anything other than what they are. Nikki Haley delivered a pretty clear version of the contortions needed by the die-hard Republican partisan who hates Trump and still votes for him because, well, politics. During the premiere of Haley’s new radio show Sirius, she said that she hasn’t forgotten his campaign’s personal attacks on her – apparently including placing a birdcage outside her hotel room to highlight his insult about her being a “birdbrain” – but that she now was willing to overlook the insults because “politics is not for thin-skinned people” 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 advances policy at all in 2024, his proposals largely revolve around a single theme: He will wave his magic wand and make the problems go away. At the GOP convention in Milwaukee, he promised: “Under my plan, incomes will skyrocket, inflation will disappear completely, jobs will thrive again and the middle class will thrive like never before.” At his rallies, he promises To end the war in Ukraine “in twenty-four hours.” The Republicans’ overarching policy program, adopted at the convention in Milwaukee after being dictated in part by Trump himself, includes elements such as the promise, “Stop the migrant crime epidemic” And “Make our college campuses safe and patriotic again.”

Earlier this week, Trump appeared in Georgia at a campaign rally billed as a political implementation of his plans to usher in a “new era of American industrialism.” While he praised his proposed tariffs as a brilliant plan to “take jobs away from other countries,” Trump, the political pundit, questioned Harris’ intelligence and patriotism, attacked electric cars (except those made by his backer Elon Musk) and said immigrants were “coming from all over the world” to ruin the country. Trump’s most important moment at this rally, as in other recent speeches, was when he relayed his insights 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.” Do you still think this is about politics? Kamala Harris may need an 82-page economic plan printed on glossy paper, but not Trump. He was sent from heaven to us to save ♦