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.

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. 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.

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.