We’re two-plus weeks out from Election Day. Republicans are in a dead panic and taking the wildest of swings. Maryland Representative Andy Harris, who is as close as we have in the United States Congress to an actual, bona fide fascist (I know that’s saying a lot, but Harris’s father served in a pro-Nazi paramilitary unit in Hungary toward the end of World War II, and Harris himself veritably worshipped Viktor Orbán), tried to blame diesel prices on the Democrats. He got laughed out of the room. Democratic candidates who are barely really liberal are suddenly not just socialists but Communists. And it practically goes without saying that they’re all gay.
This kind of scaremongering has been a part of Republican campaign strategy for my entire life. I hit my first Little League baseball the same year Richard Nixon launched the Southern Strategy, his dog-whistling and race-baiting campaign to carry the South in 1968 against Hubert Humphrey. I was a young man when Ronald Reagan launched his 1980 general election campaign near Philadelphia, Mississippi, touting “states’ rights” and making a point of doing so not far from the spot where three civil rights workers were killed by the Ku Klux Klan 16 years before. I’m pretty tired of it, though not so tired that my blood doesn’t still boil.
But these kinds of moves used to be only part of a Republican campaign. Once upon a time, Republicans did try, sometimes, to advance forward-looking ideas, or something resembling that. Reagan had his optimism; Newt Gingrich, his Contract With America; George W. Bush, his global democracy agenda. At the very least, these Republicans understood that the scare tactics had to be dressed up in the finery of something resembling a positive vision for the country.
But that was then. Now the scare tactics are the whole package. The GOP of 2026 is stripped of all artifice. It’s down to its essence. The closing days of this campaign will feature three trajectories from the GOP. They’re going to try to cheat. They’re going to lie. And they’re going to try to win on grotesque and open bigotry.
First, the cheating. This is all about suppressing the vote and trying to convince Americans that noncitizens are going to be casting votes by the thousands or even millions (OK, this involves a dose of bigotry too). On Thursday, Todd Blanche’s Justice Department sent a letter to California and Los Angeles County demanding that they prove—within 48 hours, mind you—that some 20,000 voters are citizens. Because Attorney General Todd Blanche, you see, suspects that they are not.
The Trump administration has tried this before. Very recently, in fact. Just last month, Department of Homeland Security Secretary Markwayne Mullin alleged that there were 15,903 noncitizens on the voter rolls in Nevada. He then whittled that down to 185 names (heck of a whittle!). DHS said it had confirmed that these 185 were noncitizens. Nevada looked into it. Every one—every single one—was a citizen.
It’s impossible to predict how else they’ll try to cheat between now and November 3. At Democracy Docket, which you should be checking between now and Election Day if you aren’t already, they’re tracking dozens of voter suppression lawsuits. And Axios reported on Friday that MAGA activists are pushing the Trump administration to prepare to declare martial law. The president can’t send armed troops to polling places—or at least, the law says he can’t. But he can send them into certain neighborhoods. And the DOJ can send out more such orders, and to much swingier states than California. We can be sure that the administration has thought of things we haven’t.
Next comes the lying. Of course, cheating of the sort described above is lying, but I mean a different kind of lying. I mean here the kind of lying Trump does at his rallies, about how great the economy is, how “hot” America is; and the lying House Speaker Mike Johnson does, about this Congress being the most productive in 80 years.
All politicians from both parties offer up to voters their version of reality. But they rarely say the naked opposite of reality. Barack Obama in 2010, for example, implicitly acknowledged that the economic landscape was pretty barren, but he did try (to no avail) to highlight certain “green shoots” sprouting heavenward. But no one has ever done what Trump is doing. There’s no sign it’s working—in fact it’s probably making things worse because you just can’t tell people the sky is blue when it’s full of clouds.
What’s amusing is watching Republican candidates across the country try to walk this tightrope. Some gently break with him, as Maine’s Susan Collins and Michigan’s Mike Rogers have done on tariffs. But most defend them or try to change the subject. Some still blame the economy on Joe Biden. And all of them, having voted for the Iran war, just pray that that subject doesn’t come up.
And finally—the dividing. It’s JD Vance hinting not so subtly that James Talarico is gay. Rogers and others, including Trump, talk about Abdul El-Sayed being part of the Muslim Brotherhood. On a debate stage this week, Georgia GOP Senate candidate Mike Collins slipped in a reference to Jon Ossoff’s “friend” El-Sayed, for no apparent reason other than to be able to scare viewers with a Moozlem name. And of course the flood of dehumanizing anti-trans ads continues apace and will continue through Election Day.
This is what they’ve got. And it’s what they’ve got because it’s who they are. Oh, plus they have hundreds of millions or maybe even billions of dollars, much of it from a small handful of people—like real-life supervillain Elon Musk—who want to own the government. It’ll be pretty depressing if it works.
And if it fails? It will upend decades of conventional wisdom about how Republicans can win and about voters’ susceptibility to such campaigns. And that may mark the start of a new and at least marginally less cynical and less hateful and less stupid era in American politics. And it will be made all the better by the fact that it will have been brought on, ironically enough, by the stupidest and most cynical and hateful man in recent American political history.