In 2010, a splinter group of far-right Republicans known as the Tea Party summoned a red wave of Republican voters in Barack Obama’s first midterm elections, capitalizing on the remnants of the global financial crisis and troop surges in Afghanistan to
help the GOP win 63 seats in Congress. The Tea Party wanted to be known as fiscal conservatives, but their darkest power was abject, open fury that the United States had dared to elect a Black man as president.
But 2010 was not, somehow, the most racist election in recent memory. It’s the 2026 midterms, thanks to the invective spewed by the man in the White House and the worst dregs of his movement around the country. With a war in Iran, skyrocketing gas prices, rampant inflation, and a burgeoning housing crisis, the GOP has no claim to fiscal conservatism this election cycle. Instead, all they have is race.
“There’s five hundred million Arabs in the world,” Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. said recently. “And yet they don’t produce science. They don’t win the Nobel Prize. They don’t win the Fields Prize. They don’t win the Wolf Prize. They don’t produce literature.”
RFK was making a barely veiled reference to the primary target of Republican racism this cycle: Michigan Senate candidate Abdul El-Sayed. El-Sayed is a muslim, and is sufficiently left wing so as to invite the ire of basically every faction of American politics, including centrist Democrats, centrist Republicans, and the far right, who have taken up the cause of cutting him down with particular zeal. Trump has joined in:
“If Abdul and the Democrats win, they will open the floodgates and invite hordes of jihadis to our shores, creating a nightmare of violence and terror until you cannot even have a Christmas,” Trump said at a rally in Port Huron on Sunday.
Trump has repeatedly issued some of the worst attacks against El-Sayed, repeating the claim that he is a member of the Muslim Brotherhood and calling him a “jihadist.” He has also gleefully mocked El-Sayed’s name at multiple campaign stops, and said over the weekend that he would “be the only senator that has to go through a metal detector before he is allowed to go in the Senate,” the implication, of course, being that he is a potential terrorist.
Vice President JD Vance, not one to be out-done, accused El-Sayed of “anti-white” racism, a familiar line of attack by members of the far right looking to mobilize economically disadvantaged white voters.
“Abdul El-Sayed, who maybe more than any Democrat running in the nation has engaged in the kind of explicitly anti-white racial hatred that has become common in the Democratic Party,” Vance said at a rally in Michigan on Tuesday. “I’d say that person should not be elected.”
The attacks on El-Sayed are shocking and crude, but they didn’t spring out of a vacuum. Racist dogwhistles — and more explicit attacks — have been common fodder for the GOP for decades, from Ronald Reagan’s popularization of the term “welfare queen” — a veiled attack on impoverished Black Americans — to Trump’s support of the Barack Obama birth certificate conspiracies. Some of Trump’s earliest political breakthroughs came on the back of demonizing Latin American immigrants and painting undocumented migrants as a boogeyman threatening the livelihoods of “real” Americans.
All these threads have come together in the second Trump administration, with the persecution of Haitian immigrants who were stripped of their Temporary Protected Status by the Department of Homeland Security, a campaign of terror across the heartland committed by Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents, repeated denigration of African countries in public speeches, and constant racist dogwhistles in official government communications. The Trump administration has raided the home of a sitting congresswoman, Somali-American Representative Ilhan Omar, reportedly as part of an investigation aiming to strip her of her citizenship. Trump has repeatedly suggested Omar should be deported, while making fun of her head coverings.
Trump’s racism has spread throughout the GOP, emboldening the most fringe candidates to take positions so blatantly bigoted that some squeamish members of their party are cringing. In Texas, Railroad Commissioner candidate Bo French recently doubled down on a racist post he made remarking on the number of Indian-American students at a recent University of Texas football game. Republican megadonor Elon Musk, a white South African born and raised under apartheid, has spent entire months this year posting incessantly about race, repeatedly returning to racist tropes to attack Democratic candidates as he pours money into attack ads in several states.
This kind of animus is the sign of a desperate party — one whose own consultants are already admitting might be “fucked.” The idea they’re selling to American voters is simple: Hate your neighbor, based not on what they say or do, but because of who they are. The problem is, most of their enemies are just as American as their marks, and no amount of rhetoric can cover up the fact that they’re here to stay.
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