This has now become a familiar refrain—in July, Trump called Representative Elijah Cummings’s Baltimore district a “disgusting, rat and rodent infested mess” and told him to go back there more frequently—but the Greenville rally marked a key shift in that conversation. A political press that had thus far treated Omar mainly as a kook, a naïf, or an extremist suddenly seemed a little nervous. The rally earned comparisons to Nuremberg, though mainly because of the commentariat’s poor grasp of history. (Our own country has had its share of dangerous nativist hysteria, even in Omar’s Minnesota. In 1917, the state legislature created the “Minnesota Commission of Public Safety” to attack Wobblies and Germans, two groups widely suspected of seditious tendencies. The next year, a German farmer was kidnapped and tortured by a mob, before they dumped him in South Dakota and threatened to kill him if he returned. Had the Trump family settled there, rather than in New York City, they could easily have faced such attacks.)

In their fixation on minutiae, the pundit class lost sight of the actual, easy-to-follow narrative.

In their fixation on the minutiae of the episode—like the number of seconds the chant lasted and whether or not Ivanka later pushed Trump to condemn the chants—the pundit class lost sight of the actual, easy-to-follow narrative. Omar is a refugee, a Muslim, and a young woman. The dominant political force in this country is fueled by its dedication to patriarchy, its resentment of the young, and its intense fear of demographic change, personified by immigrants in general and refugees in particular. Donald Trump won his party’s nomination because he managed to outdo each of his rivals in the ferocity and unreasonableness of his opposition to the party’s various hated classes. In 2015, nearly every Republican presidential candidate opposed allowing Muslim refugees from Syria into the United States. Establishment wimps like Jeb Bush framed their stance as only wanting to allow Christian refugees into the country, but Trump didn’t even try to give his reactionary proposals a humanitarian gloss. He simply announced he’d ban every Muslim in the world from entering the country, and register and track the ones already here. “In 20 years, I have not heard such intolerance and hatred from political leaders in this society,” Nihad Awad, the executive director of the Council on American-Islamic Relations, told The Guardian at the time.

Much of the press and the political establishment sees Trump’s racism as something he injected into a fundamentally good system, rather than some existent force he merely tapped into—either because they prefer to see it this way, or because they are morally or financially invested in believing in America’s essential innocence. That’s the only way to make sense, to take just one example, of CNN’s Chris Cillizza’s comically blinkered announcement on Twitter after the entire Republican Party lined up to defend the president’s conduct: “Every day, I am struck by how radically the GOP has changed from 2015 to today.” You see, pundits like Cillizza had believed that the Tea Party goons in tricornered hats were mad about the debt-to-GDP ratio, even though those goons actually spent most of their time shrieking about sharia law.

One lesson of the Bloomington mosque attack, now mostly forgotten outside Minnesota’s Somali Muslim community, is that it matters a great deal who notices your community, and why. Would three dimwits from hours away have selected that particular destination had they not been provided a figurative map to the community by right-wing blogs spinning paranoid fantasies endorsed by the actual president of the United States?