But do not be fooled — it has only been lip service. In these midterm elections, with health care at the top of voters’ concerns and preexisting-condition protections now established law, Republicans are on the defensive and trying to lie their way out of the political hole they have dug. Proving again that he views Americans as clueless rubes, Trump is declaring Republicans the champions of preexisting-condition protections and claiming it is Democrats who are fiendishly scheming to abolish the Obamacare requirement. Never mind that 20 Republican-run states joined a lawsuit to do away with the provision and that McConnell and other Trump Republicans are planning to make another run at repealing Obamacare after the election.

But voters are finally on to the GOP. That’s why endangered Republican candidates are changing the subject from health care in America to migrant families in Guatemala. Scott, McSally and scores of desperate candidates have decided to follow America’s most famous birther by playing to voters’ worst instincts. With their congressional majorities on the line, Republicans are frantically trying to stoke fear of “others.”

Don’t worry about health care, their argument goes, when thousands of brown-skinned marauders — somehow organized and financed by big-money Jewish Democrats — are heading our way. They aren’t like us, they have no place in our country, and they will be stopped in their tracks by U.S. troops at the border. This nonsense obviously polls well among low-information voters who have already forgotten that the last such “invasion” from Central America only resulted in a few dozen arrests.