In the weeks leading up to last Tuesday's elections, Donald Trump broke out his most reliable campaign tool: old-fashioned racism. Every chance he got, he harped on an approaching caravan of migrants trekking slowly north from Central America to apply for asylum in the U.S. Fox News, the network losing employees because of its conversion to full-on state propaganda machine, was a bullhorn for Trump, and the pair were like an ouroboros or a human centipede of anti-immigrant hysteria. The caravan is full of gang members (they claimed for no reason) and "Middle Easterners" (by which they mean "terrorists") and leprosy. The message is, "They're coming to kill you and give you biblical diseases."

But, Stephen Colbert noted on Friday, in the days following the election, Trump suddenly stopped caring. And so did Fox News:

In fact, I counted how many times they talked about the caravan on Fox & Friends. Well, technically, I had my footage department do it. I can't watch Fox & Friends because my doctor says it's just horrible. Anyway, this is true, in the six days leading up to the election, they used the word "caravan" an average of 21 times per episode. Then, the day after the midterms, Fox & Friends only mentioned it once. It was huge for like a week, and now nothing. It's the Tide Pod challenge of American politics. Except Tide Pods will actually kill you.

This isn't to say that conservatives are done trying to wring whatever cheap political points they can out of this. After all, there are still thousands of troops at the border, being shuffled around as a political stunt, and Trump is always in need of a quick distraction. Especially now that his efforts to get rid of Robert Mueller are under way.