A New York Times article published last weekend highlights what has become a clear theme of the midterm elections: the Republican Party’s vicious attacks on Democratic candidates using a variety of homophobic, Islamophobic, and sexists slurs. But this only captures a slice of an even darker story; for while it’s true that President Trump and his allies are leaning hard into such appeals, the full depths of their depravity exceed these attacks on individual candidates. The bizarre claims that Texas senatorial candidate James Talarico is trans or gay; the bigoted references to Michigan senatorial candidate Abdul El-Sayed as a jihadist who would need to pass through a metal detector to enter Congress; the atrocious ad that effectively belittled the rape of Ohio gubernatorial candidate Amy Acton when she was a girl: these aren’t just random lines of attack that MAGA opportunistically sees as fruitful, but manifestations of MAGA’s essential hatred of non-Christians, of gays and trans people, of feminism, and of non-whites.
In this, what some have argued is the GOP trying to cover for its lack of support on various issues (the economy/inflation, the Iran war) can equally well be seen as MAGA simply letting its freak flag fly in an effort to re-create Trump’s winning 2024 coalition. At bottom, this isn’t just a matter of campaign rhetoric. When the president and his allies seek to move voters by attacks that invoke a candidate’s race, or national origin, or religion, or sexual orientation, they are simultaneously working to vilify or demean entire swathes of the citizenry. In doing so, such MAGA campaign strategies are ineluctably declarations of war on the U.S. and the American people: on our basic equality and on the freedom of every citizen to live their life as they please, free from a Republican Party that seeks to turn the government into a tool of political and social repression.
Take the attacks on James Talarico, who Republicans have alternately portrayed as either gay or possibly even trans. When they claim that he is gay, the obvious implication (even if unstated) is that it it bad, weird, and disqualifying to be homosexual. These are attempts to sway voters into loathing not only Talarico, but reminding them of a whole class of citizens that the Republican Party has vilified for decades. A similar maneuver is being deployed when Republicans claim Talarico is trans or, alternatively, is a defender of trans people. Indeed, if gay people are considered unacceptable and immoral in the MAGA imaginary, then trans people are transcendentally so. As Noah Berlatsky persuasively argues, a “vicious hatred of trans people is the core final midterms message of the GOP,” with upwards of $100 million being spent on anti-trans ads in the current election cycle. He correctly identifies this demonization as central to MAGA’s larger reactionary goals, writing, “Trans hate is also a way to push the GOP’s broader patriarchal agenda and justify vindictive control of women, of children, of queer and nonconforming people, of disabled people. Fascism builds on hate to generate more hate. The GOP wants to dehumanize trans people as a goal in itself, and to target others in an ever-expanding orgy of violent authoritarianism.” In other words, although it is quite true that MAGA is resorting to anti-trans rhetoric to try to beat James Talarico, the anti-trans hatred being broadcast is part of a far broader incitement against literally hundreds of thousands of citizens for the sin of their mere existence.
In Michigan, the race for an open Senate seat between Democrat Abdul El-Sayed and GOP Rep. Mike Rogers has been the locus of unbridled anti-Islamic hatred by the Republican Party. From the president on down, the GOP has painted Dr. El-Sayed as a terrorist sympathizer and even a terrorist himself. As Ben Rhodes writes, “Donald Trump has called Abdul a “jihadist lunatic” and refers to him as “Muhammad.” Ted Cruz called him a “jihadist leprechaun” and said his election would endanger the United States. Mike Rogers, Abdul’s opponent, suggests that he is a member of the Muslim Brotherhood. Other surrogates have linked Abdul to 9/11 and various other terrorist offenses.” The president has also said that El-Sayed should go back to where he came from — a nonsensical as well as racist demand, given that El-Sayed hails from Michigan. Again, though, these attacks can’t be seen as somehow limited to just El-Sayed, but rather as invoking and inciting a far broader hatred against Muslims, of whom El-Sayed is presented as a particularly objectionable example because of his proximity to national power.
In neighboring Ohio, the GOP launched a similarly vicious attack on the Democrat’s gubernatorial candidate, Amy Acton. In a truly shocking ad run by her rival Vivek Ramaswamy’s campaign, Acton’s estranged mother calls the candidate a “liar,” accusing her of concocting stories about her past. The clincher is that the spot disputed Acton’s account of being raped by her stepfather as a girl. Subsequent reporting only re-affirmed Acton’s veracity, including comments from her brother, court documents regarding charges brought against the stepfather, and reports that the stepfather had also been accused of raping his own biological daughter. Disgusting stuff all around — but though some GOP politicos attempted to distance themselves from the ad, or even condemned it, other high-ranking Republican officials (again including President Trump) backed Ramaswamy’s jaw-dropping line of attack. Their defense of Ramaswamy became indistinguishable from a defense of child rape and an attack on Acton and other women who dare to report it; execrable, yet trodding a well-worn path for MAGA and the Trump administration, which have placed the denigration and subjugation of women at the center of their political project. So while nominally directed at Acton, the ad was clearly intended to signal to a certain set of voters that Ramaswamy could be counted on to support MAGA’s war on women.
One final example: in recent weeks, the White House has radically escalated its long-time persecution of Minnesota Representative Ilhan Omar. Federal agents raided Omar’s home, with the Justice Department apparently seeking evidence to support the administration’s goal of denaturalizing and deporting a duly-elected U.S. congressperson. But this abuse of the DOJ to serve the president’s ends was only part of the story, as the bogus investigation was preceded by Trump’s repeated racist attacks not just on Omar, but on Somalis and Somali-Americans more broadly. As I wrote at the time, “Donald Trump and MAGA have not only targeted Omar for years, but have directed towards the larger Somali population in the U.S. inflammatory, openly racist condemnations that verge up to the line of incitement of violence — making the targeting of Somalis as clear an example as possible of MAGA’s goal of an ethnically purified America.” As with the other instances I’ve cited, an attack on a single politician is hardly the whole story. The timing of the raid on Omar’s home, so close to the midterms, made it clear that the Trump White House was making a desperate play to alter the GOP’s perilous midterms trajectory by conjuring a story involving not just supposed Democratic perfidy, but the incitement of hatred against an entire group of citizens and immigrants based on their national origin.
There are many more examples of how the GOP has responded to its declining midterms odds by doubling-down on its core hatreds, but the underlying thrust is clear: MAGA’s campaign to retain control of the House and Senate is indistinguishable from its long-time war against America’s diverse citizenry, the tens of millions of immigrants who have made this country truly great, and the values of equality and comity that bind our free society together. While Democrats decry high prices and Trump’s lawlessness as they appeal to voters, GOP politicos have taken another path entirely: they attack their fellow Americans on the basis of their religion, their sexual orientation, their race, and their places of origin.
Given that Republicans look set for an electoral reckoning in both the House and Senate, we should at least note the hopeful possibility that MAGA’s atavistic appeals to voters’ darkest inclinations might not be working as well as they used to. Given that inflation and affordability concerns rank high among voter concerns, there’s a glimmer of hope that a decent number of voters are re-prioritizing economic fears over social and racial resentments. Here, the case some commentators are making that people can easily see a straight line between Trump’s economic policies and high inflation may prove not just correct, but key to an incipient breakup in MAGA’s anti-social approach to ruling America.
After all, it’s one thing to blame your troubles on immigrants, or non-whites, or women in an abstract sense, but perhaps an entirely different thing when the MAGA king is so obviously running the economy into the ground while enriching himself and his cronies at the public’s expense. While I wouldn’t go so far as to say that a lot of former Trump voters are starting to see racial and trans hatred as intrinsically wrong, they may be staring at their bank accounts (metaphorically or otherwise) and no longer feeling confident that the president will ever actually deliver them any real economic stability. And for other voters not so pre-disposed to MAGA hatreds, the GOP’s recourse to racism and misogyny may seem more obviously a non sequitur response to more urgently-held concerns when the president (through his obsession with tariffs and his never-ending Iran war) is so obviously responsible for high inflation and gas prices.
Moreover, after years of Democrats failing to fully confront the GOP on issues bizarrely dismissed as “culture war” politics — such as the equality of women in our society, the right of trans people to exist, and the moral imperative of protecting the civil rights of African Americans — we may discover that enough individual Americans do in fact see such issues as vitally important to the country and to their own lives. For instance, it is implausible that the likely enormous Latino swing back to the Democrats is primarily or overwhelmingly driven by disappointment with Trumpanomics. Common sense tell us that it is at least equally driven by repugnance at a war on immigrants that is increasingly indistinguishable from a quest to purge the U.S. of non-white residents, and that has proudly advertised its indifference to the plight of Latino citizens caught up in ICE and CBP mayhem.
Finally, to circle back to the New York Times piece with which I began: although the Times downplays the larger import of the racist and misogynistic slander against Democratic candidates, the way that these individuals have been able to refute or redirect these attacks may well have social benefits beyond mere defense of their particular campaigns. When James Talarico shrugs off accusations that he’s gay or trans, but continues to stand up for the rights of these groups while aggressively going after Ken Paxton’s corruption, he’s demonstrating that the old tricks of divide and conquer won’t work. When Abdul El-Sayed hits back at insinuations that he’s a terrorist or un-American by reminding voters he’s a son of Michigan and mocking his bad-faith critics, he’s showing millions of voters that if he can stand up for his faith and his citizenship, he’ll probably fight pretty hard for their right to healthcare, too. When Amy Acton and her defenders shame the Ramaswamy campaign into taking down its atrocious, hateful ad, they help highlight the basic indecency of MAGA misogyny. As with Ilhan Omar, whose very life story makes a mockery of Trumpist claims that Somalis are unfit to be Americans, every Democratic candidate who refuses to back down, and who turns vile racist and sexist slander into revelatory information about their accusers, is helping win the larger fight for a freer, more egalitarian America. Their individual stories help expose MAGA lies aimed at denigrating millions of Americans, and give us the outlines of a far healthier, inclusive, and optimistic narrative about the United States that every citizen can grasp.