It’s only been a few days since President Joe Biden upended the election by announcing that he would “stand down” in his campaign and endorsing Vice President Kamala Harris for the Democratic presidential nomination. But the tenor of the Republican response is already so toxic that some right-wing pundits are begging former President Donald Trump and his supporters to stick to policy critiques rather than racist and misogynistic invective.

House Republican leaders warned their caucus on Tuesday to stay away from attacks based on Harris' race and gender after several members picked up a popular right-wing media trope by describing the vice president as a “DEI” pick. “This should not be about personalities. It should be about policy. And we have a record to compare,” Speaker Mike Johnson (R-LA) told reporters following that meeting. “This has nothing to do with race.” 

Several Fox hosts echoed those warnings that evening and the following morning.

“The president, former President Trump, his focus should just be on the issues and on the economy and the border,” Fox News host Laura Ingraham said on her evening show. “To me, stick to the issues. Stay away from personal attacks.”

“Focus on that record when we’re talking about Kamala Harris,” Fox & Friends co-host Lawrence Jones implored Wednesday morning. “I worry, take it to the bank, this is going to be the most racialized presidential campaign in American history.”

“All the DEI stuff — and I get Joe Biden put it on the table and said he's only selecting a black woman. But you don't want to turn voters off,” he continued. After highlighting his belief that voters are interested in Trump’s economic record, Jones concluded, “This other stuff, I think, will turn voters off. So I think we should be cautious about it. Talk about the stuff that we just laid out right here, she has a terrible record.”

“It shouldn’t be about gender, shouldn’t be about race, this should be about her record and her policies, so what did she accomplish, Steve, when she was the vice president?” his co-host Ainsley Earhardt added. 

They are all right to be worried. Harris is the biracial daughter of two immigrants and would become the first woman president, and the right is chock-full of freaks who garner audience and money through bigotry. The resulting discourse after she emerged as the likely Democratic presidential nominee has been misogynistic, racist, and unhinged, featuring attacks on the vice president as a “DEI candidate” who “cackles like an insane woman” and is “a little bit uppity,” “got her career started giving blow jobs to successful, rich, black men,” and has “no children.”

Indeed, Jones’ advice for critics to ignore “the DEI stuff” may have been a soft rebuke of Fox Business host Larry Kudlow. Jones’ comment came in response to a clip Fox & Friends aired of Kudlow critiquing Harris’ economic record on his show the previous day — but during the same broadcast, Kudlow also claimed that the vice president’s “whole history is DEI."

The exhortations to avoid identity-based attacks are unlikely to have much of an impact. 

Ingraham suggesting Trump should stick to the issues will likewise have as much impact as if she tried to flap her arms to fly to the moon. The former president has already dabbled in bogus insinuations about Harris’ dating history and “has a long history of attacking female rivals and critics in personal terms, usually describing them as mentally unstable or worse,” as The New York Times noted. He will not change — predictions from both the right and the mainstream press that he might “pivot” have failed, over and over, for years.

And just minutes after Ingraham called for a focus on Harris’ record, her colleague Jesse Watters hosted podcaster Ben Shapiro to ask, “What do her qualifications look like other than the intersectional magic of Kamala Harris?”

“I’ve never seen this much manufactured enthusiasm for anyone outside of maybe Taylor Swift,” he added. “Me neither,” a laughing Watters replied. (A certain segment of right-wingers are pathologically incapable of acting normal with regard to the popular musician.)

The right-wing propaganda megaphone has grown in influence for decades by leveraging bigotry, culture war attacks, and incendiary conspiracy theories to grow its audience. Now some are trying to find the off-switch — but it doesn’t have one.