Former President Donald Trump thrilled his right-wing media propagandists when he followed them into the gutter on Wednesday with a sustained, racist assault on Vice President Kamala Harris’ identity. But there are obvious perils to running a political strategy that appeals largely to the right’s weirdo-wing during a general election campaign — normal people don’t want to hear that crap.

Trump’s interview at the National Association of Black Journalists convention came as his campaign has struggled to find its footing since Harris replaced President Joe Biden as the likely Democratic presidential nominee. With Trump’s once-formidable polling lead having evaporated, the rollout of his running mate, Ohio Sen. JD Vance, in shambles, and his supporters casting about for someone to blame, the former president pivoted to racism.

Trump, responding to a question about whether he agreed with many of his supporters that Harris is a “DEI hire,” accused Harris of misleading voters about her race. “She was always of Indian heritage, and she was only promoting Indian heritage,” he said. “I didn't know she was Black until a number of years ago when she happened to turn Black, and now she wants to be known as Black.”

The argument that Harris, who attended a historically Black university and pledged a historically Black sorority, only recently decided to “turn Black” is false and depraved. Indeed, Trump’s 2020 campaign had cited his campaign donations to Harris in 2011 and 2013 as evidence that he was not racist against Black people. 

But this wasn’t just a one-off comment, however despicable; it was the launch of a new talking point. Trump doubled down on social media, his campaign projected purported evidence of Trump’s claim at an event Wednesday night, his surrogates went on TV to defend his comments, and Vance — who once described his running mate as potentially “America’s Hitler” — told reporters Trump’s remark was “hysterical” and that the former president “pointed out the fundamental chameleon-like nature of Kamala Harris.”

Right-wing media figures have long targeted Harris’ identity, and her ascension to the top of the ticket revived those attacks and spread them to GOP congressional delegations. As House Republican leaders warned their caucus to stay away from attacks about the vice president’s race and gender, some conservative pundits begged Trump and his supporters to keep the focus on policy. Their desperate pleas have not been answered.

Trump’s loyal propagandists are delighted that he’s joined them in the sewer. Prominent MAGA influencers like Laura Loomer, Charlie Kirk, and Catturd2 circulated bizarre opposition research that they suggested showed Harris’ racial duplicity. On Fox News, star hosts like Jesse Watters cheered how “Trump told Kamala, ‘you ain't Black’” and thus proved he’s “not afraid of Kamala Harris and is not going to avoid issues.”

The right’s calipers crowd would rather litigate when the daughter of Indian and Jamaican immigrants is permitted to highlight different aspects of her heritage than discuss the right’s unpopular policy agenda. 

They don’t want to talk about how Trump’s economic plan would increase taxes on the middle class, cut them for rich people and corporations, and either require draconian cuts to social safety net programs like Social Security, Medicare, and Medicaid, or trigger skyrocketing deficits, inflation, and interest rates. 

They don’t want to talk about what happened after Trump appointed Supreme Court justices that overturned Roe v. Wade in his first term or how he might use federal power to further curtail reproductive freedom in a second one. 

They don’t want to talk about his cruel plan to build migrant deportation camps in order to solve a nonexistent crime crisis.

And they definitely don’t want to talk about the radical Project 2025 blueprint dreamt up by his former administration officials, which has proven so toxic that his campaign has desperately backed away from it.

They want to talk about their bizarre fixations, and GOP politicians constantly indulge them, either because they are desperate to appeal to the weirdos or because they are themselves weird. This trend has proven disastrous for the GOP, which loses elections because normal people find the right’s obsessions off-putting. 

But with the Republican Party unable to course-correct as long as Trump is in charge, that’s what the next three months are going to look like.