On Balance | Trump’s descent into an alternative reality is obscuring our own

Ever since the immediate aftermath of the January 6 insurrection in 2021, we’ve seen flashes of the US Republican Party’s traditional ideological moorings, only to be left wondering if they were just eye floaters.

It started with expressions of outrage directed at then US president Donald Trump by the likes of Trump’s UN ambassador Nikki Haley and US senator Lindsey Graham after the former president’s supporters ransacked the US Capitol. But that was short-lived once they saw how tenaciously most others in the party held to election denialism.

We’ve seen other eruptions of traditional Republicanism, including US House Speaker Mike Johnson’s unsticking of aid to Ukraine.

Trump has tried to distance himself from the Heritage Foundation’s now-infamous Project 2025, a right-wing fever dream championed by the think tank’s president Kevin Roberts, who told The New York Times that “we are in the process of the second American Revolution, which will remain bloodless if the left allows it to be”.

That started well before last week’s debate, when Trump made many of his own supporters cringe, and launched a political meme for the ages, with the false assertion that Haitian immigrants are eating dogs and cats in the swing state of Ohio.