To save the midterms, Trump is recharging the grievance politics that made him president

Donald Trump is playing one of his final cards in the midterm election race: fear of an American civilizational collapse.

To hear the president, the greatest current threat to Americans is not the prohibitive cost of groceries, gasoline, diesel and housing; his Iran war quagmire; or concerns that AI could wipe out jobs and even humanity.

It’s that White, Christian culture could be destroyed unless his Republican monopoly on Washington power is preserved in the midterm elections.

In one of the most foreboding closing arguments of any of his political campaigns, Trump is flinging racially charged rhetoric; conjuring Islamophobic paranoia; and stirring up false visions of kids being mutilated in mass transgender surgeries without parental consent. He’s also acting as an arbiter of others’ faith and American identify.

“Americans are going to stand up and declare that we will protect our civilization, we will preserve our religion, our values and our heritage, and we will never let our nation be conquered or destroyed by people that hate us,” Trump said at a rally in Kansas on Monday, at which he also used an antisemitic slur.

At his most vulnerable political moment in nearly six years as president, Trump isn’t responding with compelling, innovative defenses of his record on affordability or foreign policy. He’s intensifying the scorched-earth imagery that made his name and seeking to replenish power by weaponizing painful national divides.

In an example of his willingness to wade into some of the most sensitive cultural issues, Trump warned at his Kansas event that Democratic Senate nominee Adam Hamilton told people to “repent because you were born White.” This was a misrepresentation of the candidate’s far more expansive remarks on race, self-reflection and personal faith.

But getting the details right is hardly the point.

Trump’s anti-Muslim imagery

Trump has also been claiming that US-born Michigan Democratic Senate candidate Abdul El-Sayed is a “jihadist,” a smear he repeated Tuesday night in North Carolina. And he has been referring to El-Sayed as “Mohammed” on the basis that if “you have any problem with names, just call the guy Mohammed. You’ll probably be right.”

Such stereotyping is not merely aimed at disqualifying a political foe. It implies that everyone who shares that person’s faith or ethnic characteristics lacks the distinguishing humanity of an individual and is not authentically American.

The president offered another glimpse into his mindset in Kansas when he used “Shylock” — an antisemitic slur — to defend GOP Sen. Roger Marshall against criticism over medical billing practices. This time, he can’t say he was unaware of the term’s insinuations: He caused a storm by using it publicly in 2025.

The president is going beyond generalizing over religion and race.

He warned in Arizona this month that a Democratic Congress would lead to widespread gender transitions of children in schools. “They want to mutilate, cut your children. It’s unbelievable, what they do. … Your son leaves as Jimmy and comes back home in three days as Janet, and they don’t even ask you,” he said. He told similar baseless tales in Georgia last week and in North Carolina on Tuesday evening.

In recent days, he’s stoked fears that the rioting rocking France will cross the Atlantic if the Democrats win, after a campaign in which he’s warned socialists and communists want to obliterate the republic. He again demonized Somali-born Minnesota Democratic Rep. Ilhan Omar on Tuesday, dismissing the idea that the naturalized American citizen is entitled to constitutional rights because she is originally from a “shithouse” country.

The president has also sought to foster religious intolerance by implying that the faithful who do not share his sympathizers’ specific political creed are a national threat. On Monday, he mocked Hamilton’s religious credentials as a leader in the United Methodist Church of the Resurrection. “He doesn’t act like a pastor because his views aren’t of a pastor,” Trump said.

While admitting he’s hardly a Bible aficionado, Trump nevertheless portrayed himself as a pseudo-prophet, claiming that an unnamed Texas religious leader had been correct to predict that “he’s going to lead us to a period of time … in Christianity that nobody else can do.”

Trump has long sought to identify enemies and outsiders against whom to define himself. He’s most politically effective when he has a foil. And many politicians are guilty of exaggeration. Some, like Trump, sometimes dole out vindictive comments framed as jokes to create a layer of political cover. Vice President JD Vance, for instance, tapped into the theme of un-American outsiders, quipping Monday that a protester at one of his events must have crossed the border illegally to behave in such a manner.

Many liberals have meanwhile tended to assume that all Trump’s supporters share the apparent racial and religious prejudices of their movement’s leader. That’s not a fair criticism of voters who find the totality of his message appealing.

It is not necessarily racist to worry that Democrats didn’t properly secure the southern border. Some Americans genuinely worry whether expanding Muslim or other faith communities will fully integrate or change the character of their cities and customs. And it’s perfectly appropriate for issues like a candidate’s views on the Middle East or groups like the Muslim Brotherhood to be litigated in campaign debates. El-Sayed has hardly been unwilling to address them.

Yet Trump is going much further than simply throwing out “red meat” to supporters, in the phraseology of political consultants. It’s not credible that such a sophisticated political operator is mindlessly blurting out random thoughts during his onstage weave. The repetition of searing themes and the frequent resort to racial or religious tropes is creating a pattern of fear.

Trump’s return to some of his most inflammatory imagery coincides with a swing through red states in a last-ditch bid to jolt turnout among the most conservative voters as he tries to save vulnerable Republican candidates. His decade in top-flight politics has shown his dark rhetoric can be a rallying cry.

But even for Trump, in a political career that has always flouted decorum, the latest demagoguery is stark. It comes across as a deliberate attempt at distraction; an effort to reframe the stakes of an election dominated by concerns about affordability — and voter economic plights worsened by his war in Iran.

It’s unclear whether it will work. If he can animate low-intensity voters who have shown up only when he’s on the ballot, maybe he’ll save some red-state Republicans who never expected they’d face a fight for their careers in 2026.

But White House strategists show they understand how his outlandish comments can alienate more moderate voters by not sending him this week to swing states with the tightest races.

And Mark Sanford, the Republican former governor of South Carolina, told CNN’s Erin Burnett on Tuesday that concentrating on false stories about transgender kids was unlikely to mitigate GOP vulnerabilities.

“I think it’s off-topic because the preponderance of folks that I talked to in and around South Carolina are worried about the economy, they’re worried about affordability. They’re worried about inflation,” Sanford said. “I guess it’s a way of changing the subject if what’s going on isn’t working for you … but I don’t see this as the issue that’s going to move swing voters.”

Trump’s rhetorical barrage is shocking, even for him

The cacophony of Trump’s two terms has sometimes dimmed shock over his antics or simply exhausted his critics as he floods the zone with acrimony. American politics, of course, has long been scarred by racism. Bigotry has periodically rushed to the surface of political life, often when cultivated by a politician who sees it as a vehicle to amass more power.

Yet it’s still remarkable to witness a president, a head of state, so consciously using his megaphone to tear at national racial, religious and cultural divides. When past presidents like Richard Nixon, Ronald Reagan or George H.W. Bush — or even Lyndon Johnson, who passed the Civil Rights Act — wanted to play a race card for political reasons, they did it implicitly or metaphorically.

Trump doesn’t do such subtlety. By lashing out at undocumented migrants, minority lawmakers and transgender citizens, he seems to be deliberately trying to delineate who belongs in America and benefits from its rights — a path that is both threatening to individual citizens and national unity.

But for all its ferocity, the message this time around hints at vulnerability.

In Trump’s presidential campaigns, his search for outside foes on whom to blame America’s woes was often a galvanizing force for his movement. Now, with his popularity near record lows, the strongman’s conceit of a nation besieged by outsiders suggests a diminished leader making a last stand — rather than one with the capacity to expand his appeal through persuasion.

And with polls showing majorities of Americans sour on Trump’s performance, economic management and signature foreign war, his attempt at inflammatory distraction seems unlikely to prevail. No wonder the GOP views November 3 with growing trepidation.