It’s intellectually shallow to pretend Donald Trump is vastly more reactionary than other candidates in the Republican primary. Trump lurks at the right-most edge of the field on the general question of how aggressively we should close American society, but only by an increment. Where most GOP candidates want to prohibit Muslim refugee settlement in the U.S., Trump wants to prohibit Muslim immigration more broadly. Where other candidates want to step up deportation of unauthorized immigrants quite a lot, Trump wants to step it up even more. Where Ted Cruz wants to carpet-bomb Iraq and Syria and “make the sand glow” there, Trump wants to target the families of jihadi fighters with violence. On other issues, like war-making and tax policy, Trump isn’t even the most right-wing candidate in the field.

It’s thus disingenuous for the media, and certain Republican officials—anyone, really—to treat Trump as an anomaly rather than a reflection of the largest segment of the Republican base. But when Democratic candidates do it, it’s also extremely clever. It’s a testament both to the fact that Trump stands a shockingly good chance of winning the GOP nomination, and that Democrats are more clear-eyed about the state of the Republican party than the Republican establishment is.

Former Maryland Governor Martin O’Malley set the tone for Saturday’s third Democratic debate in his opening statement, insisting the country “must never surrender our Americans values to racists must never surrender to the fascist pleas of billionaires with big mouths.”

Nobody called Trump a fascist by name, but his name came up repeatedly. Indeed, Trump was the only Republican candidate any of the Democrats assembled in New Hampshire mentioned by name at all.

Hillary Clinton was the most persistent Trump name-checker. “We need to make sure that the really discriminatory messages that Trump is sending around the world don’t fall on receptive ears,” she said. “He is becoming ISIS’s best recruiter. They are going to people showing videos of Donald Trump insulting Islam and Muslims in order to recruit more radical jihadists.”