Eight years ago, Republican candidates flailing to avoid a midterms wipeout in October 2018 seized on a ragtag group of Central Americans as a potential lifeline. GOP fearmongering filled the airwaves as the so-called migrant caravan made its way north. As recently as Monday, I was confident Republicans would not repeat what even then was clearly a desperate play, especially in 2026’s far different political climate.

How quickly I was proven wrong.

In the past few days, President Donald Trump, Republican candidates and right-wing commentators have all latched onto images of riots and chaos in France, and are once again using white nationalist talking points to stir panic, claiming that the unrest in Europe is a preview of America’s future under a Democratic congressional majority. This is a party that’s hamstrung by a historically unpopular president, sky-high fuel prices, troubling economic data points — and little else to run on. It’s also a bet that racist rhetoric could be a better motivator for a good portion of the GOP electorate than the economic pain that Trump has unleashed upon them.

It’s also a bet that racist rhetoric could be a better motivator for a good portion of the GOP electorate than the economic pain that Trump has unleashed upon them.

We don’t have room to dive into the actual motivations and dynamics at work in the protests that have overwhelmed France since last week. (The short version is that student protests over rising living costs and deteriorating schools spiraled into days of riots and looting.) But ahead of a Monday rally featuring Trump in Kansas, The Guardian reported, “giant TV screens played about 10 minutes of Fox News coverage of the unrest that has gripped Paris and other cities, which included commentary blaming the trouble on the French government’s immigration policies.”

“If you want to see what is at stake in this election, just look at what’s happening in France,” the president told the friendly crowd of Kansans, adding that the country has been “conquered, looted and burned to the ground by migrants, jihadists and communists.” Trump went on to blame “globalist left-wing politicians” who “have treasonously imported millions and millions of third-world migrants who are totally incompatible with the West” for France’s plight.

The ugly rhetoric is nothing new for Trump, and at least partially fits in with the broader Republican focus on labeling all Democrats as communists. But online, things got even darker from a much broader array of figures, including Homeland Security adviser Stephen Miller claiming the “Democrat agenda is the mass looting and pillaging of our civilization.” The White House itself was among the X accounts posting variations of the ominous phrase “import the third world, become the third world” on Monday.

Import the third world, become the third world. pic.twitter.com/VPEuZdeClW

— Turning Point USA (@TPUSA) October 19, 2026

Trump himself used the phrase in a Truth Social post in April, which the White House shared on X. His campaign also posted it on X in 2024, using a photo of Black and brown men in contrast with a picture of sunny suburban home. As with many of the themes and phrases the administration has adopted over the past year, this one has white nationalist origins. Ironically, the slogan itself is foreign-born, having been imported from Europe’s far right.

In These Times documented an early example in Lancaster, Pennsylvania, where a small group of protesters displayed the slogan on a sign during a rally in November 2017. The handful of tiki torch-bearing white supremacists also chanted “you will not replace us,” the same phrase echoed on the University of Virginia’s campus earlier that year, the night before a white nationalist ran over a counterprotester in Charlottesville. (Trump infamously insisted there were “very fine people” on both sides of that incident, though his supporters continue to cling to the fiction that the resulting controversy was a “hoax.”)

A group called Identity Evropa took credit for that banner in Pennsylvania and many others. The Anti-Defamation League said in a report on the increased use of hate speech-laden banners that the slogans were “a sanitized version of the group’s true aim, the preservation of ‘white American identity’ and the promulgation of the idea that America was founded by white people for white people and was not intended to be a multiracial or multicultural society.” For the phrase “import the third world, become the third world” to have been adopted and laundered so thoroughly by the White House is a depressing marker for where this administration’s beliefs lie.

The GOP’s sweaty lurch to ultranationalism made at least slightly more sense in 2018. Politico, at the time, reported that Trump’s team had concluded that “border protection, safeguarding immigration officers and standing up to illegal immigration resonated with voters” in districts that were competitive in 2016. A Reuters/Ipsos poll from that September showed 42% of Americans approved of the president’s immigration policies. Likewise, Democratic strategists worried that “even the most draconian of Republican [immigration] policies” like family separation failed to turn off voters in states Trump won in 2016.

Whatever the reasoning, the recycled white nationalist rhetoric spewing out from the White House and other conservative figures is disgusting.

The push did less to blunt the GOP’s losses than a similar bid to politicize an Ebola outbreak ahead of the 2014 midterms, but it still dominated the final month before the election and left Democrats off-balance. In the aftermath of a year of anti-immigrant raids and mass deportations, the story is different. A Reuters/Ipsos poll from this week found only 36% of Americans approved of Trump’s immigration policies. Pew Research similarly found earlier this year that 52% of Americans think Trump is doing “too much” to deport immigrants.

With that in mind, the choice to go hard on France seems confounding, especially when you consider that going heavy on anti-immigration would likely backfire in many of the swing districts that Republicans would normally be hoping to flip. But as my colleague pointed out to me, this is likely a play to rile up the GOP’s base where motivation has been lacking. The apathy fueling the so-called red undertow effect has allowed Democrats to make plays for districts that just two years ago went for Trump by double digits.

Maybe the hope is to make conservatives who were likely to stay home in protest over the economic hardship Trump has caused more inclined to head to the ballot box. But whatever the reasoning, the recycled white nationalist rhetoric spewing out from the White House and other conservative figures is disgusting. I had thought that the GOP wouldn’t stoop so low during this time of desperation — and that’s on me.

The post The GOP has found its ‘migrant caravan’ for the 2026 midterms appeared first on MS NOW.

President Donald Trump has a lot of reasons to be upset in the final stretch before the midterm elections: voters angry at rising prices, reasonable predictions that the GOP will lose the House — and maybe the Senate — and a stagnant war in Iran.

Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy is not on the list of things making voters angry — and yet over the past week, he has been catching strays from a frustrated Trump. Because Trump is incapable of blaming himself for anything, including Republicans’ current political predicament, Trump and his misguided sense of victimhood are once again targeting Ukraine.

After the United States launched a war against Iran in late February, energy prices surged worldwide. Americans have grudgingly shelled out more at gas stations and the price of diesel has hit farmers particularly hard. Trump announced earlier this month that he’d struck a deal with Russian President Vladimir Putin to import Russian diesel fuel to the U.S. to bring down prices.

Experts say this is a bum deal for the U.S, as it gives several billion dollars to Moscow to continue its war against Kyiv and is unlikely to affect global fuel prices. The diesel Russia would send is still needed by, well, Russians, which would keep demand — and prices — high. Zelenskyy rightly criticized the Trump-Putin diesel deal, which prompted Trump to lash out at him for Ukraine’s attacks on Russian oil refineries. He blamed Kyiv’s attacks for the high price of diesel.

“I suggest they get a new leader who can make a deal, because he could have made many deals, and for some reason, he never does,” Trump told reporters on Oct. 10. He added, “I think it’s time for Ukraine to get a new president.” The next day, he announced that Russia and Ukraine had agreed to an “energy ceasefire” — but both countries quickly denied it. Zelenskyy, much to Trump’s ire, soon resumed retaliatory attacks on Russia’s energy infrastructure. (Moscow had bombarded the Ukrainian electrical grid for months.)

The Trump administration has since taken several worrying actions that seem intent on punishing Ukraine, and Zelenskyy specifically, for a problem of Trump’s making.

Ukraine’s access to Starshield, SpaceX’s military-grade satellite internet service, was interrupted last week. SpaceX CEO Elon Musk said any decision to shut off service came from the U.S. government, not his company. Reuters reported that the order came from inside the White House, though the administration pointedly denied that the president made the decision.

On Friday, Trump delayed implementation of a new round of sanctions against Russia. The executive order pausing the sanctions said this was “in the national interests of the United States,” but as of Monday evening, the White House had yet to clarify exactly how. Much like the Starshield disruption, the executive order prompted bipartisan outrage, but Trump has given no signal that he’s wavering.

All of the above is bad, but much more troubling is that none of it makes strategic sense to anyone but Trump, who has long demonstrated a willingness to use Ukraine as a political punching bag. Indeed, for the past decade, Trump has shown an outsized level of enmity toward Kyiv during periods of personal political stress.

Not long after the 2016 election swept Trump into the White House, the U.S. intelligence community determined that Russia had attempted to influence American voters in a wide-ranging operation. Investigations into Trump’s potential ties to that plot frustrated him to no end, leading him to embrace a conspiracy theory shifting the blame to Ukraine. In this debunked narrative, Ukraine framed Russia for hacking the Democratic National Committee’s email server and took one of the breached servers to hide the evidence.

This belief factored into the president’s first big scheme to rig the 2020 election on his own behalf. Trump had billions of dollars in military aid held back from Ukraine to try to force the newly elected Zelenskyy to find the supposed missing server and launch a bogus corruption investigation into Joe Biden, then the former vice president, and his son. The scandal led to Trump’s first impeachment.

Even after Ukraine’s bravery and resilience in the face of Russia’s aggression, Trump still sees Zelenskyy and his country as targets for his bullying

Since his return to the White House, Trump’s relationship with Zelenskyy has at times been lukewarm but has more often been frigid. Vice President JD Vance helped publicly berate Zelenskyy in the Oval Office last year. That was a lowlight in what was already a fraught dynamic. Meanwhile, Trump continues to slam Zelenskyy for refusing to make a deal with its invader Russia, but Putin is the greatest impediment to peace.

Even after Ukraine’s bravery and resilience in the face of Russia’s aggression, Trump still sees Zelenskyy and his country as targets for his bullying. He’s dropped more than 10 years of misplaced anger on the shoulders of a country struggling to survive an attempted imperial conquest.

But for all of Trump’s efforts to shift blame for his own ineptitude onto a country fighting for survival more than 5,000 miles away, very few Americans seem to be buying his spin. In hopes of improving his own domestic standing, Trump is once again exacerbating Ukrainian hardship and strife. It doesn’t seem to be working this time, either.

The post Trump wants to make Zelenskyy his midterms scapegoat appeared first on MS NOW.

A sense of deja vu is likely washing over Republican lawmakers. Many of the struggles GOP candidates are facing in 2026 eerily mirror their plight in 2018. Ahead of that year’s midterms, voters were similarly unhappy with President Donald Trump and unimpressed by the massive tax cuts passed the previous year. The conditions this time around, however, are much more dire, emphasizing how few lessons Republicans learned from their last midterm defeat.

Eight years ago, GOP candidates under House Speaker Paul Ryan, R-Wis., and Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, R-Ky., had hoped to campaign hard on the Tax Cuts and Jobs Act of 2017, also known as the Trump tax cuts. The $1.5 trillion bill was the biggest legislative package passed by that Congress, with the GOP trifecta having failed to repeal and replace Obamacare as promised. But voters weren’t very interested in hearing about the bill once it passed, and its popularity cratered as 2018 continued.

Many of the struggles GOP candidates are facing in 2026 eerily mirror their plight in 2018.

Things aren’t faring much better this time around. As previously mentioned, lawmakers have been having a tough time selling the megabill that Trump dubbed the One Big Beautiful Bill. The White House briefed House Republicans last year on rebranding the package as the “working families tax cut.” A new poll from Politico released Wednesday confirmed that while respondents prefer the new name, taxes are near the bottom of voters’ list of top issues.

The congressional Republicans of yesteryear originally planned to follow up their tax cuts with another round in 2018. (Speaker Mike Johnson, R-La., who insisted that a third reconciliation bill was possible long after it seemed plausible, must relate.) Those goals swiftly fell apart in the face of a fractured caucus and no real vision for what a new middle-class tax cut would look like. By September, the GOP was far behind in the general ballot against Democrats and looking for a way to catch up.

As The Washington Post reported at the time, Trump led the way in Republicans making “a hard pivot away from economics and into nationalism, a debate with heavy racial overtones meant to energize the conservative base.” In the weeks leading up to the midterms, the president, Fox News and many GOP candidates flooded the airwaves with warnings about a caravan of migrants making its way from Central America to Mexico. But the GOP’s caravan-forward strategy didn’t work. Democrats still gained a net of 40 seats, more than a dozen more than needed to win the majority. Republicans held control of the Senate, but the odds of that happening again are less certain.

Which brings us to the biggest differences weighing down the GOP this time around, presaging what could be an even more brutal potential loss. In short, the party’s lack of interest in any policy beyond tax cuts and nationalism has caught up with it. MAGA has hollowed out the Republican Party to place Trump at its center, leaving it intensely vulnerable without his coattails support its candidates. But Trump was already a hindrance in 2018 to more moderate Republicans trying to brace themselves against the oncoming blue wave. Today, he’s an anchor dragging down everyone with an “R” next to their name, prompting the “red undertow” effect that has conservatives prepared to stay home on Election Day.

It is only right that in failing to learn from the past, Republicans seem doomed to repeat it.

The president already wasn’t very keen on selling the 2017 tax cuts to voters himself. At a May 2018 tax roundtable, Trump instead spent time talking about “China, North Korea, Syria, immigration, the mayor of Oakland, Calif., Congress’s budget deal, his own poll numbers and the media’s coverage of his presidency.” He’s grown much worse at staying on topic in the intervening years, preventing him from providing a coherent message for rank-and-file members to rally around.

A repeat of the anti-immigrant play would also likely backfire in 2026. Democrats have mobilized heavily around Trump’s detention strategy and Immigration and Customs Enforcement’s tactics. Conservative voters poised to stay home are unlikely to find a sudden burst of enthusiasm, not when more pressing matters are weighing on them.

Rising prices, inflation and other economic concerns have become the focal point of this year’s midterms. There is no avoiding how much the blame for each falls at Trump’s feat, try as candidates might to split the difference. And blame for Trump’s return to the White House — a choice the GOP had every opportunity to avoid — falls at the feet of all those who backed him when his stock was higher. It is only right that in failing to learn from the past, Republicans seem doomed to repeat it.

The post The GOP’s midterm deja vu should make them very, very worried appeared first on MS NOW.

Congressional Republicans on the campaign trail have struggled to sell voters on last year’s massive tax cut bill, one of their signature achievements. In most cases, candidates would want data to share on who benefited from that legislation. But the IRS is months behind on sharing key data about how the new law affected taxpayers. It’s an absence that raises important questions about why the IRS hasn’t shared what it has learned.

The One Big Beautiful Bill contained all kinds of changes to the tax code, including new deductions for workers on their tips and overtime wages. The IRS was due to release a set of data detailing the overall tax landscape at the end of the 2026 filing season in July, with an updated version in September. According to Politico, this would have included vital findings on “the uptake of individual provisions in the code as well as things like how much more people in different income groups reported earning, and how many people still owed money to the IRS at the time of filing.”

These figures could show that the tax bill was a huge success — or provide more proof that the tax burden has shifted away from the rich and onto Americans already angry at President Donald Trump’s handling of the economy.

These figures could show that the tax bill was a huge success — or provide more proof that the tax burden has shifted away from the rich and onto Americans already angry at President Donald Trump’s handling of the economy. Per Politico, the IRS “said it is awaiting approval from the Treasury Department to publish the figures.” While the agency does sit under Treasury’s broader umbrella, this isn’t a call Secretary Scott Bessent would normally be making. But the IRS has been the center of an outsized share of drama since January.

The agency went through eight leaders last year, and the commissioner seat is still currently vacant. Bessent stepped in as acting commissioner last year, but his window to legally run the agency closed. The Treasury said in a statement that while he “oversees the operations of all Treasury offices and bureaus, including the Internal Revenue Service,” by March, his service “has expired, and he has not served in that capacity since that time.” Bessent clarified to the Senate in July that while he was no longer the acting commissioner, he was still “performing the duties of the commissioner.”

Day-to-day operations at the IRS, though, are being handled by Social Security Administration chief Frank Bisignano, who has been serving as the IRS’ “chief executive officer” since last October. The role didn’t exist before Bessent created it and it seems like a way to get around having to get a new commissioner confirmed after the last one, Billy Long, was fired two months into the gig. Whether it’s Bessent making the call to withhold the data or Bisignano passing the buck, the outcome is the same: the suppression of public data that could be potentially embarrassing to the administration.

The most plausible alternate, less nefarious, possibility: The IRS simply lacks the personnel to have successfully parsed this year’s tax data. The aforementioned drama included major cuts at the IRS, both in funding and in staffers. Congressional Republicans have clawed back millions of dollars meant to ease the burden on already overworked auditors. The upheaval of mass layoffs, early retirements and the so-called Department of Government Efficiency’s efforts to worm its way into the system prompted a mass exodus of staffers. More than 31,000 employees had left the IRS as of this January, according to its inspector general.

The departures were enough for the IRS to petition the Treasury, in a February memo, for an immediate hiring spree, warning that “ongoing staffing shortages put the 2026 Filing Season at risk,” according to a Washington Sun report in June. CNBC reported in July that Senate Democrats were curious about the discrepancy between that memo and Bisignano previously telling Congress that there were no staffing issues at the agency. (“The IRS delivered a historically successful filing season, efficiently processing returns and issuing average refunds that were 11 percent higher than last year as Americans benefited from the President’s Working Families Tax Cuts,” an IRS spokesperson said in a statement to CNBC.)

What can be said for certain is that the longer the IRS delays in releasing this data, the worse it will look when it finally comes to light.

Whatever the cause, the full consequences of the most consequential law this outgoing Congress passed remain a mystery. It’s hard to say more about the withholding though given the absence of, well, data. We don’t know how much of the delay is due to incompetence, negligence or ill-intent — or a combination of the three.

What can be said for certain is that the longer the IRS delays in releasing this data, the worse it will look when it finally comes to light. If it vindicates the GOP with positive news, it will be too late to have made an effect on the election. If it damns the tax bill’s effects, Bessent and Bisignano will have a lot of questions to answer about why that information was kept from voters until many their ballots had already been cast.

The post What the IRS is hiding ahead of the midterms appeared first on MS NOW.

Democrats are in an unfamiliar spot with less than three weeks to the midterm elections — things are looking surprisingly sunny. A new Gallup poll released Tuesday shows the Democratic Party is viewed more favorably overall than its Republican counterparts. When combined with a slew of positive indicators in races around the country, the conventional wisdom is increasingly leaning on the side of Democrats taking back at least one chamber of Congress, if not both, as well as having a shot at several key governorships.

A large part of this optimism comes from in-roads in congressional districts that strongly supported President Donald Trump in 2024. The polling swing has given a sea of races in once-deep-red territory a purple tint, moving them closer to true toss-ups.

Consider this a reminder: It’s too early to characterize a district turning purple in the polls as a win.

But consider this a reminder: It’s too early to characterize a district turning purple in the polls as a win. Democrats really ought to measure their expectations until votes are tallied and a seat is flipped fully blue.

In fairness, the political tea leaves seem clear enough that Republicans are deeply worried, despite having a massive cash advantage. Politico reported Wednesday that some senior GOP lawmakers have “privately concluded that it is likely impossible for them to keep control of the House of Representatives.” Outside groups and campaign committees are moving resources away from potential GOP pickup seats to playing defense in areas that would normally be considered safe, all in hopes of preventing the four-seat swing needed for Democrats to claim a majority.

The triage underway from the GOP reflects a political environment that has their usual voters contemplating staying home in protest of Trump’s policies and the high cost they’ve extracted. The “red undertow,” as political analyst Charlie Cook dubbed it, has been dragging down enthusiasm among GOP voters and greatly improved Democratic odds. As MS NOW reported Wednesday, the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee, House Democrats’ election arm, has been working to maximize its resources to take advantage of the tailwinds propelling Democrats forward.

The Gallup poll is instructive here, because while more respondents favored Democrats, the party’s brand remains, well, bad. Yes, 43% of respondents viewed Democrats favorably, compared to 35% for the GOP, but that still means a majority of Americans view the party unfavorably. And though independents have been looking more approvingly at Democrats than the GOP, it reads more as a rejection of Trump than an embrace of Democrats.

Last week, the Cook Political Report moved 18 House races in Democrats’ favor, including five races shifting either from “solid Republican” to “likely Republican” or “likely Republican” to “lean Republican.” Four GOP-held seats likewise went from toss-ups to rated “lean Democrat.” All of this bodes well but doesn’t exactly guarantee that the Democratic candidate will prevail in each of those races.

Meanwhile, a Senate map that heavily favored Republican incumbents now sees cracks in Kansas, Ohio and even Texas — which could presage a Democratic takeover up the upper chamber as well. But Texas has been a particularly fickle state, one that’s been considered in play for Democrats in past election cycles, only to slip through their fingers time and again. And races in Maine, Minnesota and New Hampshire, all of which at least tilt blue, are closer than would be expected given the struggles seen in usual safe GOP seats.

Purple isn’t the same thing as blue — but it means the opportunity is there if it can be properly seized.

It’s great to see Democrats emboldened and going on the offensive as the GOP retrenches. But the fact is that even the most favorable polls can’t be fully trusted, not given how many of the closest races sit within the margin of error. Even polling analyst Nate Silver, who infamously gave Hillary Clinton a 72% chance of victory in 2016, made sure to hedge his bets against the polls and election results being a mismatch once again.

Purple isn’t the same thing as blue — but it means the opportunity is there if it can be properly seized. Accordingly, this isn’t a call for Democrats to revert to their usual anxiety or retreat into a cloud of pessimism. If anything, it’s a call for campaigns and candidates to keep pressing to convert the possible into a reality. And a reminder to voters to reject complacency or considering the election a fait accompli.

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