Eight years after Republican candidates seized on a migrant caravan to avoid a midterm wipeout, the party is reaching for the same rancid playbook. This time, President Donald Trump and his allies are using riots in France to spread white nationalist rhetoric and frighten Republican voters into showing up.

The 2018 campaign centered on a group of Central Americans traveling north as Republican fearmongering saturated television coverage. Despite the desperation of that tactic, Trump, Republican candidates and right wing commentators have now embraced images of chaos in France as their latest political lifeline.

Their pitch is that unrest in Europe offers a preview of what America would face under a Democratic congressional majority. It arrives as Republicans contend with a historically unpopular president, soaring fuel prices, troubling economic data and precious little else to offer voters.

The French protests began with students demonstrating over rising living costs and deteriorating schools before spiraling into days of riots and looting. Yet Republicans have focused on immigration, converting complex unrest abroad into another blunt instrument for racial panic at home.

Before a Monday Trump rally in Kansas, The Guardian reported that “giant TV screens played about 10 minutes of Fox News coverage of the unrest that has gripped Paris and other cities, which included commentary blaming the trouble on the French government’s immigration policies.”

“If you want to see what is at stake in this election, just look at what’s happening in France,” Trump told the crowd. He claimed France had been “conquered, looted and burned to the ground by migrants, jihadists and communists.”

Trump then blamed “globalist left-wing politicians” who “have treasonously imported millions and millions of third-world migrants who are totally incompatible with the West” for the country’s turmoil. The rhetoric paired his familiar attacks on immigrants with the broader Republican effort to brand Democrats as communists.

The messaging grew darker online. Homeland Security adviser Stephen Miller claimed the “Democrat agenda is the mass looting and pillaging of our civilization,” while the White House joined X accounts posting variations of “import the third world, become the third world.”

Trump used that phrase in a Truth Social post in April, which the White House later shared on X. His campaign also posted it on X in 2024 alongside a photo of Black and brown men contrasted with a sunny suburban home.

The slogan has white nationalist roots and was imported from Europe’s far right. In These Times documented an early American example from November 2017, when protesters in Lancaster, Pennsylvania, displayed it on a banner while carrying tiki torches.

Those white supremacists also chanted “you will not replace us,” echoing the words heard at the University of Virginia before a white nationalist ran over a counterprotester in Charlottesville. Trump later insisted there were “very fine people” on both sides, while his supporters have continued calling the controversy a “hoax.”

Identity Evropa took credit for the Pennsylvania banner and others like it. The Anti-Defamation League described such slogans as “a sanitized version of the group’s true aim, the preservation of ‘white American identity’ and the promulgation of the idea that America was founded by white people for white people and was not intended to be a multiracial or multicultural society.”

The political calculation was at least more discernible in 2018. Politico reported then that Trump’s team believed border protection, support for immigration officers and opposition to illegal immigration resonated in districts that had been competitive in 2016.

A Reuters/Ipsos poll from September 2018 showed 42% of Americans approved of Trump’s immigration policies. Democratic strategists also worried that even severe Republican measures, including family separation, had not repelled voters in states Trump carried in 2016.

The current landscape is markedly different after a year of raids targeting immigrants and mass deportations. A Reuters/Ipsos poll released this week found only 36% approved of Trump’s immigration policies, while Pew Research found earlier this year that 52% believed Trump was doing “too much” to deport immigrants.

Leaning heavily into immigration could therefore backfire in swing districts Republicans would ordinarily hope to flip. The apparent calculation is that white nationalist rhetoric can energize conservatives whose lack of motivation has helped Democrats compete in districts Trump won by double digits just two years ago.

Perhaps Republicans hope racial fear will overcome anger about the economic hardship Trump has caused. Whatever their reasoning, laundering white nationalist slogans through the White House is a disgusting marker of just how low a desperate GOP is willing to sink.