Not a Dog Whistle. A Foghorn.

Plus: The weird attack on dog parks

Happy Thursday.

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As we slouch toward the weekend, I want to call your attention to something I wrote for The Atlantic yesterday; update you on what’s happening here in Wisconsin; and share some thoughts about male role-models.

But before we get to that, we have to talk about the latest example of the consummate and consuming weirdness of the MAGA right.

First, they came for the childless cat ladies…. but you knew they wouldn’t stop there.

In his forthcoming book, Kevin Roberts, the CEO of the Heritage Foundation — and architect of project 2025— “rails against birth control, IVF, abortion, childlessness, and dog parks.” (It will not surprise you to learn that the book’s forward is written by J.D. Vance.)

Media Matters reports:

Roberts rails against the Swampoodle dog park in Washington, D.C., for having too much room for dogs to play and not enough for children, blaming this on “the antifamily culture shaping legislation, regulation, and enforcement throughout our sprawling government.”

As Thomas Hobbes might have said: AYFKM? But, yes, Mr. Roberts is, indeed, quite angry about the dog parks. Media Matter’s Angelo Carusone explains:

[He] describes this dog park in Washington D.C. and he's really mad about it….

And his whole theory about the dog parks is if you go to this, it's not just the size that he's mad about. It's the fact that he describes these people there that are angry and unhappy and miserable.

He sort of paints this very bleak picture of childless people gathering around this very large dog park, and he blames Democrats and public policy for even allowing for such a facility to be built in order to accommodate these really depressing -- these sort of depressed angry people.

I think I can speak for all dog owners when I say that we are not nearly as depressed, angry, unhappy, miserable, and weird, as this guy.

And you know who agrees?

**

Trump’s racist foghorn.

I wish I could have put flashing lights around my latest piece in the Atlantic. And I want you to ask yourself: Why is this not a bigger story?

On Earth 2.0, the Trump’s blatantly racist post on X would be dominating the news cycle. There would comparisons to the 1988 “Willie Horton ads,” and other episodes of vicious race-baiting. But for Trump, it’s just another day that ends with y.

The collective shrug over Trump’s outburst of racism seems to be a perfect illustration of what Jonathan Chait wrote the other day:

The most important way Trump benefits from a double standard is simply that his violations of democratic and civic norms are so widespread that the media have given up on holding him to anything resembling a customary standard of behavior for a presidential candidate.

ICYMI:

This is what I wrote in the Atlantic:

Yesterday, the official Trump War Room campaign account on X posted a picture of a peaceful residential neighborhood, which it captioned “Your Neighborhood Under Trump.” The tranquil image was juxtaposed with a chaotic scene of Black and Hispanic migrants who’d arrived in New York last summer, captioned: “Your Neighborhood Under Kamala.” “Import the third world,” the post declared. “Become the third world.”

Subtle it was not.

As the Huffington Post noted, the clear implication was that “if Vice President Kamala Harris wins the presidency in November, nice suburban neighborhoods will be overrun with hordes of Black people and immigrants.”

The racist meme would probably not have been especially notable if it had been posted by a white nationalist user on X.

But the message was posted by the official “War Room” account of the 2024 Trump campaign. And it is completely consistent with the ugly tone that the campaign has taken as the former president struggles to get traction against Kamala Harris.

At the top of the “Trump War Room” account a pinned post declares: “Meet the Real Kamala. Weak. Failed. Dangerously Liberal.” Like Trump himself, though, the account has a singular obsession: It regularly highlights stories about migrant crime and posts pictures of black or brown men, who are described as “animals” and “monsters.”

From the Atlantic:

The drumbeat seems to have gotten louder this week. Yesterday, the War Room account also reposted a clip of a Fox News segment about a Haitian migrant charged with raping a child, adding, “Life under President Trump: Increased child tax credits. Life under Kamala Harris: Increased child rape.” …

None of this is new for Trump, who has a long and well-documented history of racist remarks, and whose campaigns have been built on stoking fears of migrants. Indeed, migrant crime has been a consistent Trumpian theme since he came down a golden escalator in 2015 and declared: “When Mexico sends its people, they’re not sending their best … They’re bringing drugs. They’re bringing crime. They’re rapists. And some, I assume, are good people.”

As a candidate in 2015, Trump called for “a total and complete shutdown of Muslims entering the United States,” and according to The Washington Post, he referred to Haiti and African nations as “shithole countries” while president. “Why do we need more Haitians, take them out,” he said, according to Washington Post sources who were briefed on a bipartisan meeting on immigration. Trump later denied using the term shithole, but has continued to emphasize and exploit misleading charges about crime committed by immigrants.

Trump has never backed off. His campaign is now pushing that same line, but with a grotesque twist. They are hammering on the theme that it is Trump’s Black female opponent who is responsible for all of this supposed chaos. “Kamala Harris IMPORTS rape and plunder into our communities,” another Trump War Room post declared yesterday. “President Trump will END this carnage and DEPORT these illegal aliens back to where they came from.”

The same day, the campaign posted: “Filiberto Gonzalez, an illegal alien, was just arrested for raping a 10-year-old boy TWICE in Mississippi. Kamala Harris imported this animal into our country.”

Just in the last two days, the campaign posted a link to a Fox News story headlined: “Illegal migrant allegedly commits 22 crimes in 6 months: 'It will get worse,' expert says.”

The very next post, shows a black man in custody, declaring: “Border Czar Kamala flew this illegal alien from Haiti into the country via the Harris-Biden ‘parole’ program. He was charged with raping a child in March.'“

It goes on and on. In a post accompanied by two surveillance pictures of a black man who is apparently on the subway, the campaign announced: “Yet another illegal alien that Border Czar Kamala allowed into our country has been charged with rape.”

All of this echoes Trump’s longstanding fearmongering about immigrant crime. (He also seems to think that asylum seekers are coming from insane asylums or other mental institutions, which may explain his bizarre references to the fictional serial killer Hannibal Lecter when he’s talking about immigration.)

But it was Tuesday’s post about the “neighborhoods” that highlighted Trump’s even darker embrace of the Great Replacement Theory — the fear that black and brown migrants will displace “normal Americans” in the voting booth, the workplace, and in a neighborhood near you.

Once confined to the white-nationalist fringes, the theory was popularized in part by the former Fox News host Tucker Carlson, who said in 2021 that “the Democratic Party is trying to replace the current electorate, the voters now casting ballots, with new people, more obedient voters from the Third World.”

Now Trump’s own campaign is amplifying these fears of a “Third World” takeover. Trump has taken his racism far beyond a dog whistle…

You can read the whole thing here.

Meanwhile, in Wisconsin

The normies had a good night; the Democrats flex their turnout muscles; and the WOW counties continue to slip away from the GOP.

It’s always dangerous to read too much into a primary election, but Tuesday’s vote was nonetheless notable for several reasons:

• Democrats won again. They beat back two GOP-backed constitutional amendments that would have stripped some power from the Democratic Governor, Tony Evers.

• The margins were surprisingly large — 57 percent voted “no” —in part because of the massive turnout in Democratic areas, an early sign of voter enthusiasm that might carry over to the presidential election. “I’m blown away,” WisDems chair Ben Wikler told a local blogger.

• “The era of the WOW counties as a unified Republican stronghold is o-v-e-r, over.” Via Dan Shafer 

  The environment has been trending in this direction for quite some time, and while Washington County continues to be deep red, Waukesha and especially Ozaukee are becoming bluer and bluer in election after election.

   

  In Ozaukee, the results of the statewide referendum vote was essentially 50-50. In Waukesha, yes votes gained only 57%. A decade ago, Scott Walker won re-election with 72% of the vote in Waukesha County and 70% of the vote in Ozaukee.

   

  Not only are these results well behind the numbers Walker was posting in the early 2010s, it’s also behind two-time double-digit statewide election loser Daniel Kelly’s numbers in 2023. The Milwaukee-area suburbs continue to shift to the left, and given the population of these counties — Waukesha is the state’s third most populous, home to more than 400,000 people — this matters a great deal toward the eventual results in statewide elections. Republicans continue to have a real problem here.

• Voters (mostly) rejected the crazies. Two of the most voluble election deniers — Rep. Tim Ramthum (R-Campbellsport) and Rep. Janel Brandtjen (R-Menomonee Falls) were crushed in the primary.

• Democrats pick a Blue Dog. Via Politico:

  Rebecca Cooke, a waitress and small business owner raised on a Wisconsin dairy farm, beat out two other Democrats in western Wisconsin’s 3rd District.

  Cooke has an uphill battle against freshman Republican Rep. Derrick Van Orden in her Republican-leaning district in November. But if she wins, she plans to join the Blue Dog Coalition….

  Raised in a bipartisan household, she understands both parties — but chose to run as a Democrat because of a number of issues, including reproductive rights and the GOP’s immovability on widely supported policies like universal background checks….

  She’s betting that staking out moderate positions can help her pull an upset in November by winning so-called pivot counties, places that voted for Barack Obama in 2008 and 2012 and then Donald Trump in 2016. Wisconsin’s 3rd District includes a handful of these elusive places; of the more than 3,000 counties in the U.S., only about 200 fall in this category. They prefer Democrats of the populist variety: Gluesenkamp Perez and Golden both hail from districts with multiple pivot counties, as did Democratic vice presidential candidate Tim Walz when he was in Congress.

Nota Bene

Mona Charen: The Man Child vs. the Man’s Man

IF KAMALA HARRIS BECOMES the first woman president, her first accomplishment could well have already happened—elevating and honoring the positive side of masculinity.

Tim Walz, whose politics are to the left of most Americans and certainly most swing voters, has been welcomed not as a box-checking, progressive pick, but as a Midwestern dad who poses with his hunting dog, served for 24 years in the military, and coached the high school football team to a state championship. He’s a man’s man without being a strutting jackass. He can speak of volunteering for the national guard at age 17 and then segue to naming his first child Hope after years of infertility.

I don’t know if any of this factored into Harris’s calculations, but a good male role model is an excellent foil for the swaggering, snarling, cartoonish version of masculinity on offer from the Republican party right now.