Last Wednesday, Donald J. Trump made his closing argument for the midterms, just as he had introduced his presidential campaign: cranking up racist fearmongering for his base, this time by tweeting out a new Republican ad, which opened with the caption: "ILLEGAL IMMIGRANT, LUIS BRACAMONTES KILLED OUR PEOPLE!"

The 53-second video spliced clips of Bracamontes, an undocumented immigrant who was sentenced to the death penalty for killing two police officers in 2014, maniacally grinning in a courtroom with footage of Central American asylum seekers breaking down a border gate between Guatemala and Mexico. Bracamontes had been released from jail by Arizona sheriff Joe Arpaio, whom Trump had previously pardoned; twice deported under both Republican and Democratic administrations; and returned under George W. Bush, but the ad blared the message: "Who else would Democrats let in?" Former Ku Klux Klan leader David Duke celebrated the ad as a "masterpiece personifying the insanity of our immigration Policy. Bravo Trump!"

It echoed the infamous 1988 Willie Horton ad, which used the visage of a black convict who raped and beat a white woman while furloughed from prison to similar effect: a scary dark threat to white order. The Horton ad helped sink the candidacy of Democratic presidential nominee Michael Dukakis, who was then up by 17 points. Then George H. W. Bush's campaign kept its distance from the ad, made by a supposed independent group "Americans for Bush." And strategist Lee Atwater lied at the time about his shameful involvement with its creation. This time around, the Republican leader made no such effort to deny association between him and the racist ad he tweeted. The president did so despite the already deadly consequences of stoking racist paranoia about refugees seeking asylum at the border, a perfectly legal process. He tweeted that ad no less than four days after Robert Bowers murdered 11 people in a Pittsburgh synagogue because he believed Jews were bringing "invaders" into the country. "I can't sit by and watch my people get slaughtered," Bowers wrote about the caravan before gunning down the innocent.

Besides the ad itself, Trump falsely threatened to do away with the constitutional right of birthright citizenship via executive order, likely a fantasy of anti-immigrant advisor Stephen Miller. And he attempted to drum up his own little war, promising to deploy up to 15,000 military troops to the border, despite the fact that there are already about 20,000 border patrol agents there, and the group of refugees, hungry and trudging by foot, is some 900 miles away and has already shrunk in half to about 3,500 unarmed, presumably exhausted, people. "Women don't want them in our country," Trump said, repeatedly calling the asylum seekers an "infestation" and "invasion." These were the same epithets once used to incite atrocities and civil rights abuses against other immigrant groups, including the Irish, Italians, Chinese, and Japanese, fleeing famine and poverty, which resulted in sundown town massacres and the Japanese-American internment.

It was not just Trump either. In the U.S., racist fearmongering has long been an effective political strategy, and with little public enthusiasm for the GOP's one legislative victory—tax cuts heavily tilted towards the very rich—in two years of controlling both chambers of Congress and the presidency, there has been little else to run on. In Connecticut, Republican candidate Ed Charamut released an anti-Semitic flyer of his Jewish opponent, Democratic state Rep. Matt Lesser, in cartoonish form with bulging eyes holding $100 bills. In Minnesota, the National Republican Congressional Committee (NRCC) released another anti-Semitic ad depicting Soros, who had just been targeted with a pipe bomb, surrounded by stacks of cash as some sort of puppet master behind Democratic Congressional candidate Dan Feehan. In California, Republican Congressman Duncan Hunter, who was indicted for federal corruption charges, accused his Mexican-Palestinian American opponent Ammar Campa-Najjar, a Christian, of being a radical Islamist terrorist attempting to "infiltrate" Congress. In New York's 19th congressional district, where Republican Representative John Faso is falling behind, the NRCC released a dog-whistle attack ad calling Democratic candidate Antonio Delgado, a Harvard Law graduate and Rhodes Scholar, a "big-city rapper." In Florida, a racist robocall attacked black Democratic gubernatorial hopeful Andrew Gillum, over monkey noises in the background, with an impersonator saying: "Well hello there. I is the negro Andrew Gillum and I'll be askin' you to make me governor of this here state of Florida. My state opponent, who done call me monkey, is doin' a lot of hollerin' about how 'spensive my plans for health care be." Similarly, another bigoted robocall targeted Georgia voters, mock-mimicking Oprah Winfrey as a "magical Negro," dabbling in anti-Semitic conspiracy theory, and calling another black Democratic gubernatorial candidate Stacey Abrams "poor man's Aunt Jermima."