The Trump campaign is really digging deep in the far-right archives for its rhetoric in the closing days of the 2024 presidential campaign.

The manifestly unfunny joke by one of his supporters at Madison Square Garden this week that Puerto Rico is a “floating island of garbage” could end up costing Trump the election. But the revival of old discourses of pseudoscientific racism by both Donald Trump and several supporters around him haven’t drawn as much scrutiny. Trump’s obsessive fixation on Kamala Harris’s race and intelligence, with the constant refrain that she is a “low-IQ individual,” has been going on for months.

The insult evokes the racist ideologies of the twentieth century that have recently become more popular in the right-wing manosphere. Their prominence in a modern presidential campaign marks a dangerous devolution in our national politics.