President Joe Biden’s decision to end his reelection campaign and support Vice President Kamala Harris has sent the right-wing propaganda machine spiraling out of control, with its anti-Biden message honed over the past few years replaced by total chaos.

The right spent years arguing that Biden was an addled old man who is raising the prices Americans pay for gas and groceries while deliberately importing migrants to harm their families. While this litany was typically based in deception and misinformation, it overlapped with the primary concerns of swing voters and helped generate an environment where polls saw the president losing to former President Donald Trump in November.

But Biden upended the race on Sunday, announcing that he would “stand down” his campaign and endorsing Harris for the Democratic presidential nomination. His decision was a blow to the Trump campaign, which had geared its strategy around Biden running for reelection and reportedly believed Biden’s nomination gave Trump the best chance to prevail.

The subsequent hours have revealed that the right is totally unprepared for how to respond to a Harris candidacy. She has been vice president for three years and a prominent senator before that — but it seems as if they’ve never put together a playbook with compelling arguments against her. The resulting morass points to major vulnerabilities in the right-wing propaganda ecosystem.

Fox News scrambled for its opposition research but seemed unable to put together consistent arguments that might resonate. 

Soon after Biden’s announcement, anchor Harris Faulkner offered the ludicrous argument that his decision not to seek reelection constituted a “threat” to “democracy.” 

That evening, Fox’s Jesse Watters hosted Trump, his vice presidential nominee Sen. J.D. Vance, and independent candidate Robert F. Kennedy Jr. to complain about Biden dropping out, while prime-time host Sean Hannity took shots at Harris’ laugh and, quite literally, grasped at straws. 

On successive hours, Fox contributors brought on to discuss Harris attacked her as too tough on crime and too soft on crime. 

Monday morning featured a montage of old clips of Biden saying he was running, as if to complain about how unfair the president had been to his opponent by ending his campaign.   

All the while, MAGA influencers were plastering X with unhinged conspiracy theories about Biden’s decision to step down from his race and absurdly characterizing Harris’ candidacy as a “coup.”

Harris would be the first woman president and is the biracial daughter of Indian and Jamaican immigrants, and the right is infested with weird little freaks whose incentives favor being the worst possible versions of themselves, so the resulting discourse has featured a hefty helping of racism and sexism. They’ve branded her as a “DEI hire” who is “a little bit uppity”; pushed the racist conspiracy theory that she is not eligible for the presidency due to her parentage; focused attention on her decades-old dating history; and suggested it is disqualifying that she has “No children.” (“And no, becoming a step-parent to older teenagers doesn’t count.”)

Meanwhile, the GOP organ that generates decontextualized fodder for right-wing media is reupping video of Harris describing her outfit while introducing herself at an event whose attendees included blind people, while Republicans are claiming in rapid succession that they’ll sue to keep Biden on the ballot and that he should immediately step down from the presidency.

The chaos demonstrates what Kat Abughazaleh described in a Mother Jones video earlier this month as Fox’s “Kamala problem”: The right-wing propaganda network has struggled “to villainize her properly” over the past several years as it previously did to Hillary Clinton before her 2016 run, leaving its hosts flat-footed. 

It also points to a critical weakness in the composition of the right-wing ecosystem: With radio giant Rush Limbaugh and Fox founder Roger Ailes dead, and former Fox star Tucker Carlson banished from its airwaves, the propaganda apparatus is an orchestra without a conductor who can lead its disparate parts to the same consistent message.

Instead, the closest thing the right has to a conductor is Trump. But his lack of discipline and unhinged nature makes him unsuited for the role: He’s spent the last day melting down on Truth Social, arguing that Biden is faking COVID-19, that he may back out of a presidential debate against Harris, that Republicans should somehow be “reimbursed for fraud” for any money spent against Biden, that Biden may “wake up and forget that he dropped out of the race,” and that his decision to drop out makes Democrats “the real THREAT TO DEMOCRACY.”

Right-wing propagandists are part of a mammoth and well-funded industry, and I expect them to figure out something more coherent eventually. But there’s not that much time before the election, and they seem short on ideas thus far.