The message from the second night of the Republican National Convention was clear — and brutal: Elect Donald Trump this November or the United States will be overrun with brown people and drugs that will kill you, your family, and everyone you care about.
The GOP trotted out an array of lawmakers throughout the night’s programming, dubbed “Make America Safe Again,” to deliver their well-worn lines about migrant crime and the need to build a border wall, but the gist of the evening was best captured in an interstitial video rife with garish imagery — including stock footage of a cadaver in a morgue, a family crying at a funeral, and, for some reason, a nuclear bomb exploding.
“This is the man responsible for your family’s safety,” the video began, showing a string of unflattering clips of President Joe Biden. “And he’s failed you — terribly.”
The video keyed on comments Biden made during a 2020 Democratic primary debate about how the United States is ready and willing to accept migrants seeking asylum. Clips of crowds of migrants played as an ominous narrator warned of drug gangs, sex traffickers, and ISIS terrorists. It’s all “putting America on high alert for an attack and your family at great risk” — and it’s all the “weak” and “incompetent” Biden’s fault.
As the crowd watched the video and listened to the series of Republican speakers dishing out lurid, horrifying details, many of the assembled delegates, audience members, and conservative luminaries whooped, hissed, chanted, and at times fist-pumped. Everyone appeared conditioned and desensitized to the tales of terror, having heard versions of these tales of out-of-control bloodletting numerous times before on Fox News and elsewhere. Meanwhile, attendees waved signs that read “STOP BIDEN’S BORDER BLOODBATH.”
Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Texas) seemed inspired during his speech to the convention, which immediately followed the video. “Americans are dying,” he said. “Murdered, assaulted, raped by illegal immigrants that the Democrats have released.”
Cruz highlighted the deaths of Laken Riley, Rachel Morin, and Kate Steinle — whose stories are fixtures in right-wing fear-mongering about migrant crime — asserting they “happened because Democrats cynically decided they wanted votes from illegals more than they wanted to protect our children.”
Studies have shown that immigrants are significantly less likely to commit crime than Americans born in the U.S., including in Cruz’s home state of Texas.
Most of the night’s speakers referenced the border. House Speaker Mike Johnson (R-La.) said we “cannot allow the many millions of illegal aliens they’ve allowed across our borders to harm our citizens, drain our resources, or disrupt our elections,” nodding to the Great Replacement conspiracy theory that Democrats are deliberately trying to flood the nation with immigrants to win elections. So did Johnson’s fellow Louisianan lawmaker Rep. Steve Scalise (R-La.). “Biden and Harris want illegals to vote now that they’ve opened up the border,” he said.
Rep. Elise Stefanik (R-N.Y.) lamented Biden’s “wide-open border” and the “sanctuary cities” in her state. Sen. Tim Scott (R-Fla.), who wants to be the next Senate majority leader, joked about how in his “nightmare,” Biden erased the border and “flew in so many illegals into our country that Mexican cartels started getting frequent flyer miles.” Sen. Tom Cotton (R-Ark.) spoke of a “third-world invasion” and detailed his own real-life nightmare of a flight he was on being “full of these migrants.”
It wasn’t just lawmakers, either. Michael Coyle, who runs an Instagram page that chronicles drug use in Philadelphia, spoke about the opioid epidemic in the city. “Joe Biden and Kamala Harris are the ones who opened our southern border and allowed Chinese fentanyl to pour in unconditionally,” he said, before describing how some “tranq” addicts “smell of rotting flesh,” and how Trump “will end the urban nightmare.”
Republicans projected migrant-fueled doom and gloom all night, but they also looked ahead to what will happen to them should Trump win another term in November. “We’ll start by securing the border. If you came here illegally under Joe Biden you’re going back to where you came from under Donald Trump,” said Rep. Jim Banks (R-Ind.). Vivek Ramaswamy, Trump’s primary opponent turned lapdog, said that electing Trump is the only way to “seal” the border and “restore law and order in this country.”
Somehow, Trump’s plan to crack down on immigration is even more terrifying than the Republicans who spoke on Tuesday night let on. He wants to round up undocumented migrants across America and toss them in detention camps until they can be kicked out of the country. He’ll do away with due-process hearings to make it easier to do so, and will even contract the military to help with the eradication effort. He told Newsmax earlier this year that he’ll also give local law enforcement “immunity” to crack down on migrants however they see fit.
Trump has also spoken in far more denigrating terms about undocumented immigrants than most of his minions would dare. He has echoed Adolf Hitler by saying migrants are “poisoning the blood of our country,” describing them throughout the campaign as violent criminals — just as he did in the summer of 2015 when he appalled America by kicking off his first presidential campaign by saying Mexico was sending “rapists” across the border.
Tuesday night at the Republican National Convention was yet more proof of what has long been obvious: that Republicans have not only embraced Trump’s disgusting rhetoric about immigrants over the past decade, they want it to define the party.
The grisly programming of the convention’s second night was perfectly in line with Trump’s B-movie-grade, gory vision of what “law and order” should look like in modern America.
“In conversations I’d been in the room for, President Trump would explicitly say that he’d love a country that was totally an ‘eye for an eye’ — that’s a direct quote — criminal-justice system, and he’d talk about how the ‘right’ way to do it is to line up criminals and drug dealers before a firing squad,” a former Trump White House official previously told Rolling Stone.
“You just got to kill these people,” Trump would often say while in the White House, this ex-official recounted.
“He had a particular affinity for the firing squad, because it seemed more dramatic, rather than how we do it, putting a syringe in people and putting them to sleep,” the former official said. “He was big on the idea of executing large numbers of drug dealers and drug lords because he’d say, ‘These people don’t care about anything,’ and that they run their drug empire and their deals from prison anyways, and then they get back out on the street, get all their money again, and keep committing crimes … and therefore, they need to be eradicated, not jailed.”
Firefighters work to extinguish a fire at an office building in Kyiv following a Russian strike on Sept. 23, 2026.Kostiantyn Liberov/Libkos/Getty Images
Volodymyr Zelensky and Donald Trump on the sidelines of the 81st United Nations General Assembly in New York, on Sept. 22, 2026.
Trump is Selling Out Ukraine to Putin
Most Americans continue to support Ukraine in its war against Russia. But under President Donald Trump, their government is now on Russia’s side.
The relationship between Washington and Kyiv has been in crisis since Trump returned to power last year. The White House increasingly blames Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky, rather than Russian President Vladimir Putin, for the war’s continuation.
“Zelensky is not a good guy for us to deal with,” the president said in a TV interview on Friday. “I’m not a big fan of Zelensky. They’ve destroyed that country.”
Even as Trump blamed Zelensky, Russia was launching hundreds of missiles and drones targeting Kyiv.
The crisis has deepened over the past two weeks as Trump has taken a flurry of steps to undermine Ukraine and assist Moscow, beginning with a proposal to let Russia sell diesel fuel to the U.S. and culminating in Friday’s decision to effectively waive portions of the so-called “Graham Bill.”
The bill, named after recently deceased Russia hawk Sen. Lindsey Graham, is a recently enacted law that would have tightened economic pressure on Russia.
“The decision to undo all of this, to block all of it, seems wrong to me. And it definitely helps only the Russians,” Zelensky told reporters in Kyiv on Saturday. “It only fuels their satisfaction and their desire to keep killing people. This certainly does not stop the war.”
Ahead of the announcement, the administration worked throughout the week with tech billionaire Elon Musk to throttle access to the military version of Starlink. The space-based internet system has become a critical lifeline for Ukrainian defenders — although both the White House and Musk have denied responsibility for deciding to limit usage.
Multiple officials describe hours of heated phone calls between Americans and their Ukrainian counterparts, after the White House ordered its people to ramp up pressure on Kyiv and deliver an ultimatum that the U.S. would cut off intelligence unless Ukraine stopped attacking Russian oil refineries.
Trump has been courting Moscow with energy deals and eased sanctions to try to deliver lower fuel prices — which have spiked due to disruptions from the U.S.-Israeli war with Iran — ahead of midterm elections. He is trying to recast the fallout not only from the Iran quagmire, but also his failure to end Russia’s war in Ukraine, as someone else’s fault.
Once again, Trump has made Zelensky the scapegoat, blaming him for high diesel prices.
“Zelenskyy is using Diesel Refineries in Russia as a target, knowing that these attacks are seriously hurting the world diesel markets, including those in the United States,” Trump wrote on social media on Sunday, adding “he doesn’t want to end this war, and probably never did.
The world has gone through the looking glass since the first time I met Zelensky in Mariupol, less than two months after his election in 2019. The man once derided for his willingness to make peace is now condemned for refusing to surrender. In Washington, the victim has become the aggressor, the adversary has become the friend.
Zelensky was visiting the bustling industrial port to attend the Fifth Annual Liberation Day Parade, an event held by the Azov Regiment. The far-right volunteer unit had played a central role in retaking the city from pro-Russian separatists in 2014. Five years later, Azov had become a bugbear, a central pillar in the Kremlin’s propaganda about “neo-Nazi” Ukraine and a staple of Western media coverage — despite the combined far-right never pulling more than three percent of the vote in any Ukrainian election.
Zelensky campaigned on ending the simmering war in Donbas by speaking directly to Moscow — and that led many to fear he would give up land to secure peace. There was so much anger about it that there were already rumors of a coup plot by right-wing nationalists only 60 days into his term.
It seemed the “comedian-turned-politician” — as he was invariably dismissed in international media — was in over his head. But I had seen Servant of the People, the popular TV series in which he played a schoolteacher who becomes president due to a viral video rant about endemic corruption. This is no mere satire, I thought. It is a political manifesto packaged as mass entertainment.
And so it proved. Zelensky and his cohorts built a political base via sitcom. His party was named after the show, and the last episode aired three days before the start of the election that would bring him the presidency.
Zelensky was hardly the first to parlay a television personality into a political career. After all, back in the United States, Trump had built his candidacy largely on the popularity of his fictitious portrayal of a successful business tycoon in a reality TV show.
So on June 15, 2019, there was Zelensky in Mariupol, celebrating Azov’s triumph while keeping the regiment itself at arm’s length. Zelensky was trying to show he wasn’t afraid of the far-right — and he wouldn’t let it claim a monopoly on patriotism.
I watched Zelensky work the crowd at a concert. “Mariupol is a Ukrainian city forever,” he told the audience, to wild cheers. Few Americans at the time really cared about Ukraine’s new president. They weren’t watching what was happening between Moscow and Kyiv.
Within three summers Russia invaded, and that vibrant city by the sea was left in ruins, surrounded by mass graves.
Zelensky became the face of dogged resistance, rallying his nation in its desperate hour. He’s now in the seventh year of a five-year term, with elections prohibited while the country is under martial law.
The far-right threat proved stronger in America, where a cadre of reactionary extremists have taken power. They, too, want to oust Zelensky. The transgression they charge him with isn’t his willingness to sell out his country; it’s his unwillingness to give it up. It’s Putin who wants peace, Trump and his cohorts say. Zelensky is the war-mongering dictator.
Through the looking glass, indeed.
There was a time after that first disastrous Oval Office showdown, where Trump’s venal arrogance was on full display, when people thought the relationship between Washington and Kyiv could be salvaged. But Trump has yet to make any substantial moves to pressure Russia.
Trump’s overriding of the Graham bill shows exactly how unrestrained he feels in mollycoddling Putin — the bill passed with 86 votes in favor in the Senate, a display of bipartisan resolve that was for nought.
Republicans in Congress keep explaining away Trump’s words and actions. But the excuses never change the result. Trump’s actions might be defensible if they actually set the belligerents on a path to peace. But there’s no reason to think they will.
That’s because Trump and his MAGA mouthpieces are delusional. To anyone who knows Ukraine — to anyone who is honest about Russia — listening to the American president pontificate about the war is like attending the Mad Tea Party in Wonderland.
Trump, Hatter-in-Chief, presides over chaos with ever-changing rules, one minute spouting nonsense about the war having started because he lost a “rigged election,” and the next barking riddles about Crimea having “four sides of ocean.”
All the usual suspects echo the same ignorant talking points and hone in on the same culprit. Musk says “Zelensky has gone too far.” Former Trump adviser Michael Flynn, who nearly went to prison for lying about his meetings with Russians during Trump’s first campaign, says once Zelensky is gone, “this war will end and people of that region of the world can start rebuilding their lives.”
Trump and his allies behave as if this war is just a matter of personalities and deals. But the war in Ukraine is not a real-estate transaction. It’s not even about geopolitics — NATO expansion or spheres of influence — as so many seem to believe.
This war isn’t about empires, it’s about national identity.
That’s where Trump — and Putin — go wrong. Zelensky is a figurehead. Even if you get rid of him, Ukraine will keep fighting. Even if Kyiv were to fall, and Russia magically occupied the entire country, Ukrainians would resist.
Russian imperialists have been trying to destroy the idea of Ukraine for generations. Joseph Stalin, one of the bloodiest dictators in human history, starved millions of Ukrainians to death; he purged, executed, and deported tens of thousands in part to eradicate their national identity. He couldn’t do it. The tsars before him couldn’t do it, either.
This isn’t some mysterious, unique human experience. The English could never stamp out Irish nationhood in hundreds of years of occupation; Imperial Japan couldn’t stamp out the Koreans; neither the Israelis nor the Palestinians will eradicate the other nation, despite all their efforts.
Resistance to Russia is central to the very idea of Ukrainian statehood. So long as Russia is intent on destroying Ukraine as a nation, the war will go on. Peace doesn’t require Zelensky’s acceptance of Russia’s territorial demands. It requires Putin’s acceptance of Ukraine as a nation. Americans deserve a government that has figured this out and acts accordingly.
Alice found her way out of Wonderland by waking up. It’s high time America and its political leaders do the same.