Every time you think they can’t go lower, Donald Trump and the Republican Party manage it. Trump’s claim that there are “unknown Middle Easterners” in a migrant caravan coming from Central America forced the New York Times to give its thesaurus a real workout. The newspaper described that as “a dark and factually baseless warning,” an “unsubstantiated charge,” and an “apparently groundless inclusion,” while noting that “Trump suggested without any proof that the opposition was involved in instigating the caravan.”

Invaluable Trump-lie-tracker Daniel Dale wrote that:

Trump’s dishonesty careened into the realm of absurdity on the weekend. At a rally in Arizona on Friday, he half-jokingly said that since many Democrats are willing to give driver’s licences to unauthorized immigrants, “next thing you know they’ll want to buy ’em a car.” At his Nevada rally on Saturday, he asserted that Democrats already do want this: “They want to give ’em cars.”

But the Times pointed out, Trump is not alone. The Republican Party is right there with him in its racist attacks on African American Democratic candidates like Florida’s Andrew Gillum and New York’s Antonio Delgado and Texas’s Colin Allred, by “accusing Democrats, without evidence, of going soft on MS-13, a Latin American gang that Mr. Trump regularly depicts as a national menace.” It’s a politics of fear, and the fear Republicans are trying to stoke and exploit is explicitly racist. Trump may be the loudest, but his party is playing the same tune.

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