Perhaps you aren’t familiar with Laura Loomer. Congratulations; that level of detachment from the online fringe is undoubtedly healthy.

For the purposes of this article, though, it’s necessary that you know at least a little something about her background, so you’ll need to bear with me for a moment.

Loomer is one of myriad right-wing voices whose presence in the national conversation is a function of sheer will, of her unrelenting interest in doing what she can to attract attention. She is one of those people for whom different people point to different anecdotes as the best encapsulation of her politics and approach.

Some, for example, like to summarize Loomer by talking about the time she handcuffed herself to the door of Twitter’s office in New York City because she had been banned from the platform for posting hateful comments. Others identify the time she tried to expose the liberal bias of a college by starting a pro-Islamic State fan club. Others simply elevate any of the various toxic comments Loomer has made on social media — comments that seem to be appearing at a more rapid clip as the nation’s attention has, at long last, turned in her direction.

This is because Loomer appeared at former president Donald Trump’s side several times in recent days. She has always been at his side ideologically and has interacted with him before, including at a tournament for the Saudi-funded golf tour hosted at one of Trump’s clubs. Earlier this year, Trump allies began worrying that he seemed to be drawing Loomer into the fold. And this week he did, including bringing Loomer on his plane as he traveled to the presidential debate and then having her tag along as he attended commemorations of the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks. Loomer has promoted conspiracy theories about those attacks.

Loomer’s presence in Trump’s inner circle before Tuesday’s presidential debate spurred a particular backlash. During his encounter with Vice President Kamala Harris, Trump amplified false claims about immigrants and relied heavily on assertions and falsehoods that are rampant within the right-wing conversational bubble. His team had pushed him to attack Harris in specific ways, without being goaded into distracting fights. He very much did not do this. So: Was Loomer to blame?

The answer, quite obviously, is no.

Trump’s debate-prep team included Rep. Matt Gaetz (R-Fla.), for example, not exactly someone who might be expected to discourage Trump’s more inflammatory impulses or to have a particularly useful insight into the tactics likely to be deployed by a Democrat. This is in keeping with Trump’s shift in the post-Biden campaign world toward people with whom he feels comfortable — and who will not discourage his more volatile instincts.

That certainly includes Loomer. But the instincts are Trump’s own. Both he and Loomer jumped into national politics at a moment when the fringe-right was using social media to gain new traction. They diverged only in the success they saw in riding that wave. Loomer might be thought of less as a Svengali who infiltrated Trump’s universe than as a personification of his own online presence. It’s as though he brought his Truth Social replies with him on his plane to the debate. As if he took the printouts of praise that a staffer provides him and formed them into a person who would do the same thing.

There is no reason to think that, had Loomer not been on that plane earlier this week, Trump’s debate performance would have been significantly different. Would he have avoided elevating baseless claims about immigrants eating pets, something that had been pervasive on right-wing social media the day before? Would he have responded to Harris’s obvious efforts to get him to be mad about crowd size with indifference if not for Loomer’s presence? Reader, he would not.

It’s certainly not helpful to his campaign that Trump invited someone who promoted conspiracy theories about Sept. 11 to a somber Sept. 11 memorial. It is not helpful to have aligned himself with Loomer only to see her get into nasty public feuds with other prominent Republican allies (like Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene of Georgia or Sen. Lindsey Graham of South Carolina). It is not helpful that Loomer followed up being at Trump’s side with obnoxious, racist comments about Harris. Thanks to her proximity, Trump now owns those actions to some extent, in the same way that he now owns part of Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s eccentric beliefs.

But it’s not like Trump didn’t already have similar issues. In 2016, he suggested that George W. Bush bore some blame for the Sept. 11 attacks. He has feuded with plenty of Republicans, including Graham. He has made offensive, racist comments about his political opponents and immigrants, too. He and Loomer are products of the same instincts and biases; they are prone to elevating similar falsehoods and conspiracies because they think they’re politically useful or they believe them or both.

It’s easier to explain Loomer’s presence as something that makes Trump feel comfortable (like bringing back former aide Corey Lewandowski) than it is to suggest that her arrival has pushed Trump in some new direction.

Loomer is a manifestation of Trump’s worldview, not a deviation from it. If you object to Loomer, your objections really lie with the former president.

White House officials are signaling that President Joe Biden will not imminently move to block Nippon Steel’s bid to acquire U.S. Steel amid mounting concerns over the political and economic consequences of nixing the deal, according to three people with knowledge of the matter.

The White House last week had been preparing to announce that the president would formally block the Japanese company’s proposed $14.9 billion acquisition of U.S. Steel on national security grounds. But after vocal opposition to the idea, White House officials have now indicated that such a decision is unlikely in the short term and may not be made until after the 2024 presidential election, according to the people, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to describe confidential conversations.

The president remains opposed to the deal, officials said. No announcement was ever scheduled. But the pace of internal deliberations has slowed.

White House spokeswoman Saloni Sharma disputed that there had been a change of plans, saying an announcement was never imminent and that the president remains committed to waiting for a recommendation from an interagency review board, as the law requires.

The delay of any announcement, however, comes as investors, Pennsylvania Democrats and some members of the steelworkers’ union warned that the deal’s collapse could spark an economic calamity for Pennsylvania’s beleaguered steel belt.

Shares of U.S. Steel have risen by more than 12 percent over the past two days of trading, as investors grew more optimistic that the deal would survive.

“People certainly don’t think we’re where we were Tuesday of last week. Everybody was like: ‘We’re dead. It’s over. We’re done.’ There’s definitely a sense we’ll probably get a chance to fight til November 5th. What happens Nov. 6 is still up in the air,” said one U.S. Steel shareholder, who supports the merger and who spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss a politically controversial subject.

The United Steelworkers union, which endorsed Biden for reelection and endorsed Vice President Kamala Harris in her presidential bid, has opposed the transaction from the outset.

White House officials have said they are waiting for a recommendation from the Committee on Foreign Investment in the United States (CFIUS), the interagency board that reviews foreign transactions for national security implications. The panel is chaired by Treasury Secretary Janet L. Yellen and includes six other Biden cabinet secretaries as well as other political appointees who take direction from the president.

Since March, Biden has publicly opposed U.S. Steel being owned by a foreign firm.

“The president’s position is that it is vital for US Steel to remain an American steel company that is domestically owned and operated. The President told our steelworkers he has their backs, and he meant it,” Sharma said in a written reply. “As we made clear last week, we have not received any recommendation from CFIUS.”

The proposed corporate acquisition has assumed outsize importance given its potential political impact on the 2024 election.

Biden’s opposition to Nippon Steel’s acquisition of the once-iconic U.S. Steel aligned with the position of the United Steelworkers union. David McCall, president of the labor organization, has described the deal as a threat to his members’ long-term job prospects and pension security.

But a move that the White House may have hoped would bolster its chances of winning Pennsylvania’s 19 electoral votes has instead triggered significant opposition among Democrats in western Pennsylvania’s steel belt.

“The White House was prepared to act precipitously and I think they were surprised by the pushback they got from all quarters,” said one person close to the process, who spoke on the condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to speak to the media.

On Thursday, USW leadership told its members that Nippon Steel would favor U.S. Steel’s nonunion operations in Arkansas rather than its unionized workforce that operates Pennsylvania’s traditional blast furnaces.

But in towns near Pittsburgh, many steelworkers and their neighbors were upset by word of the president’s apparent plan to kill the deal, which they see as the best chance for U.S. Steel’s outdated mills to survive.

“Nobody from his administration, or any of the administrations, have bothered to come to talk to the workers, the ones that are going to be affected by this,” said Democrat Chris Kelly, mayor of West Mifflin, Pa., home to one of the U.S. Steel facilities that Nippon Steel has pledged to modernize.

Without Nippon Steel’s cash, U.S. Steel has warned that it might close some of its aging facilities in the Mon Valley. The loss of such an important corporate employer and taxpayer would result in tax increases on other businesses or a reduction in public services, he said.

“Everybody in the country is not one issue. But when you’re at a swing state, right now the biggest issue in this state is U.S. Steel. It could cost the election in Pennsylvania,” Kelly said.

The company’s share price plummeted Sept. 4 in the wake of news reports that Biden had decided to kill the Nippon Steel takeover. U.S. Steel stock lost roughly a quarter of its value that day in 30 minutes of trading as investors absorbed the news.

Over the past week, the White House heard from business community representatives and the Japanese government about the likely negative fallout from the president’s decision to quash the deal. Pennsylvania Gov. Josh Shapiro (D) and his team have also been in communication with the administration, and “his top priority has been protecting Pennsylvania workers,” said Manuel Bonder, a spokesman for the governor.

In the Mon Valley, a few miles southeast of Pittsburgh, the company’s steelmaking heritage dates to 1901. Nippon Steel has promised to spend $1 billion updating the facilities there, including by replacing a mill that produces steel to make automobiles and appliances.

“This deal is very important to the community. There’s a big disconnect between local elected officials here and what seems to be our federal representatives,” said Republican Sam DeMarco, an at-large councilman in Allegheny County, home to the steelmaker’s Mon Valley Works.

About 11,500 local residents either work for U.S. Steel or for local businesses that depend on its plants, he said.

“It would be devastating to see them leave,” DeMarco said.

U.S. Steel CEO David Burritt warned on Sept. 4 that there would be “unavoidable consequences” if Nippon Steel’s $14.9 billion bid collapsed. “Thousands of good-paying union jobs” would be in danger, according to a company statement.

Also at stake are $2.7 billion that the Japanese company has pledged to invest in U.S. Steel’s aging facilities as well as the company’s commitment to keeping its headquarters in Pittsburgh.

The business community also raised concerns this week about the president’s handling of the deal. In a Sept. 11 letter to Yellen, the CFIUS chair, seven business groups — six from the United States and one from Japan — complained that “political pressure” was corrupting the government’s review of the Nippon Steel deal.

If the U.S. routinely approved or rejected proposed investments by foreign companies on the basis of domestic political concerns, other countries would do the same to American businesses, said the letter from groups including the U.S. Chamber of Commerce and the Global Business Alliance.

Entering 2024, the terrain that lay in front of former president Donald Trump offered two very different, overlapping paths. He had been charged with more than 90 criminal counts in four jurisdictions, his attorneys scrambling to figure out how to defuse as many of them as possible. But he was also the dominant front-runner in the contest for the Republican presidential nomination, step one toward being elected president again — and the ability to stall or upend those indictments entirely.

Nine and a half months later, those paths look quite different. Trump is formally the Republican nominee and, despite his opponents replacing their nominee, has an even-odds chance of winning election in November. But most of the criminal threat he faced has already evaporated regardless.

On Thursday, the judge overseeing the case brought against Trump (and a number of his allies) in Fulton County, Ga., dismissed two more of the 13 charges Trump had originally faced. He’d already set aside three of those charges, meaning that the threat to the former president now centers on only eight criminal counts.

Those sit alongside the four charges filed against Trump by special counsel Jack Smith in D.C. Those charges faced their own challenges after the Supreme Court determined in July that Trump had broad immunity from prosecution for actions undertaken under the auspices of his presidential office. Smith filed a superseding (that is, replacement) indictment in late August, but Trump’s legal maneuvers have been effective in stalling a criminal trial in that case.

Those charges are also federal, meaning that, if reelected, Trump could have his Justice Department simply bring the prosecution to an end.

He could have had his administration do that for the federal charges brought against him in Florida, too, if Judge Aileen M. Cannon hadn’t already thrown them all out. Those charges, centered on his retention of classified documents after leaving the White House, were generally seen as the biggest threat to Trump — until Cannon was tapped as the judge overseeing the case. Soon after the original indictment, Smith’s team obtained a superseding indictment that added charges related to an alleged effort to obstruct the investigation; those, too, have been dismissed.

That leaves the 34 charges brought against Trump in New York — charges that went to trial in April and resulted in criminal convictions across the board.

Far from being problematic for Trump, the New York charges have probably been beneficial to Trump, at least so far. After the indictment was obtained — the first to be brought against the former president — his position in the Republican primaries surged. He effectively cast the indictment as politically motivated in the eyes of Republican voters, both establishing that his eventual conviction would be seen as meritless but also coloring the subsequent indictments in the same way.

Those charges do mean that Trump will at some point face criminal sanction (assuming that his efforts to have the conviction thrown out aren’t successful), which poses an obvious risk. But he has been able to have sentencing delayed until after the election, meaning that, again, he may be able to address the question of punishment from the elevated platform of the presidency.

None of this is how Trump’s critics hoped the situation would play out. There was an ongoing assumption — or perhaps hope — that the criminal charges or any convictions would hobble Trump, reducing the odds that he would win the White House again. (Trump likes to present this assumption as the predicate for the charges, a claim for which there’s no evidence.) That clearly hasn’t happened. It is unlikely that will change; with less than two months until Election Day, the charges related to his efforts to overturn the 2020 results — those in D.C. and Georgia — will not be tried.

From the outset, Trump’s political fate was intertwined with his legal one. Winning the presidency wasn’t just an ego boost, it was a literal get-out-of-jail-free card. But thanks in part to the slow workings of the justice system and thanks in part to (obviously sympathetic) judges in Florida and at the Supreme Court, the legal landscape is already very different — even before the election arrives.

President Joe Biden lashed out Friday at former president Donald Trump for his comments about a Springfield, Ohio, community that has seen an influx of Haitian migrants.

“I want to take a moment to say something [about the] Haitian American community that’s under attack in our country right now,” Biden said during a White House event celebrating Black Excellence. “It’s simply wrong. There’s no place in America. This has to stop, what he’s doing. It has to stop!”

His remarks came several moments after White House press secretary Karine Jean-Pierre spoke, referencing her heritage as a Haitian American.

Speaking as “the first Black, openly queer White House press secretary and, I’ve got to add, a proud Haitian American,” Jean-Pierre said of Biden: “I can tell you, representation matters to him. Our voices matter to him, our perspectives matter to him and our success and our community matters to him.”

The city, about 25 miles east of Dayton, was thrust into the national spotlight this week when Trump, at Tuesday’s debate with Vice President Kamala Harris, amplified racist and xenophobic conspiracy theories about Haitian migrants, claiming that they were abducting people’s pet dogs and cats and eating them.

Members of the Haitian community in Springfield are there legally and have been granted temporary protected status in the United States after fleeing profound unrest and violence in their home country.

The rhetoric has escalated, and numerous buildings in Springfield — including its City Hall and an elementary school — were evacuated Thursday due to a bomb threat that included “hateful language” about the city’s immigrant population.

On Friday, two elementary schools were evacuated based on information received by the Springfield Police Division, the Columbus Dispatch reported. The Springfield City School District did not immediately return a voice message seeking comment.

Trump’s running mate, Sen. JD Vance (R-Ohio), doubled down on his criticism of migrants Friday.

Without citing evidence, Vance wrote on X: “In Springfield, Ohio, there has been a massive rise in communicable diseases, rent prices, car insurance rates, and crime. This is what happens when you drop 20,000 people into a small community.”

Vance went on to charge that the Democratic presidential nominee, Vice President Kamala Harris, “aims to do this to every town in our country.”

A spokesman for Vance told The Washington Post that he would provide evidence for the senator’s claims but did not say when.

On Tuesday, Vance conceded on X, “It’s possible, of course, that all of these rumors will turn out to be false,” before he went on to claim inaccurately that a Haitian migrant “murdered” a child in the city last year. The boy’s grieving father said Tuesday night the death of his son, Aiden Clark, was the result of an accident, and he has demanded an apology from Vance and others who have falsely described it. The 11-year-old was killed last year when the school bus he was riding in was hit by a vehicle driven by a Haitian immigrant who did not have a license.

“Using Aiden as a political tool is, to say the least, reprehensible for any political purpose,” Nathan Clark said at a public meeting Tuesday. He later named Vance, Trump and other politicians. “They have spoken my son’s name and use his death for political gain. This needs to stop now,” he said.

Officials in Springfield and Ohio Gov. Mike DeWine (R) have said the rumors of pet-eating migrants are unfounded.

WILKES-BARRE, Pa. — On the eve of her debate with Donald Trump, Kamala Harris’s advisers were anxious. Within a deeply calcified electorate, her poll numbers appeared to be plateauing. She was facing one of the most experienced presidential debaters in history. Beltway pundits were questioning whether her initial burst of momentum was evaporating.

But the vice president’s aggressive performance in Philadelphia electrified her grassroots supporters and helped her notch the coveted endorsement of Taylor Swift as she raised an eye-popping $47 million in the 24 hours after the debate.

Her fans filled arenas in Greensboro and Charlotte, N.C., where they queued up outside for hours before she arrived Thursday — shimmying to the hip-hop beats of a DJ near the magnetometers and donning bright green stickers bearing Harris’s shorthand for turning the page on the Trump era: “We’re not going back.”

As Harris focused this week on expanding her potential paths to victory in November — targeting North Carolina, where Barack Obama was the last Democratic presidential candidate to win the state in 2008 — the first post-debate poll suggested a small but potentially promising post-debate bounce.

Still, in every speech since Tuesday’s faceoff, the vice president has warned her supporters that the race will remain close until the final days. She and her advisers have repeatedly outlined the hurdles for Democrats — from Republican efforts to restrict the counting of certain ballots to the hundreds of millions of dollars that Trump-aligned super PACs plan to spend trying to define Harris in the most negative light.

With early voting slated to begin within days, Harris has toggled this week between events aimed at activating her core supporters — including Black voters in Charlotte and Greensboro — and a push to drive up her margins in tougher territory for Democrats such as Johnstown, Pa., a tiny blue dot in western Pennsylvania surrounded by redder areas that have favored Trump in recent elections.

“We know ours will be a very tight race until the very end. We are the underdog. Let’s be clear about that,” Harris said in Greensboro. “We have hard work ahead of us, but we like hard work. Hard work is good work.”

Headed into the debate, polls showed a dead even race between Harris and Trump. But a post-debate poll from Reuters/Ipsos showed Harris leading Trump among registered voters 47 percent to 42 percent. About 49 percent of respondents said Harris “seemed like someone who would listen to me and understand my concerns,” compared to just 18 percent who viewed Trump that way. (The poll’s margin of error was plus or minus three percentage points for registered voters).

The Harris campaign sees that theme as a critical avenue for persuading voters who still don’t know much about the vice president or are just tuning into the election. In the debate, in speeches and ads this week, the Harris campaign has been trying to drive the message that the vice president would strive to be a president for all Americans while casting Trump as out for himself.

Her newest ad Friday featured lines from her debate closing statement where she told viewers that during her career as a prosecutor, she never asked a victim or a witness whether they were a Republican or a Democrat. “The only think I ever asked them: ‘Are you okay?’ ” she says in the featured clip. “’That’s the kind of president we need right now. Someone who cares about you and is not putting themselves first.’”

Harris will drive that same message Friday as she tries to reach the many blue-collar voters who have favored Republicans in recent years, with visits to Johnstown — where she is meeting privately with union leaders — and Wilkes-Barre, a former coal town with a heavy union presence in Pennsylvania’s Luzerne County.

Obama won Luzerne County by 9 points in 2012, but Trump then claimed victory in the county with a nearly 20-point margin. Obama similarly narrowly won Cambria County in southwestern Pennsylvania in 2008 after campaigning in Johnstown with the message that special interests and lobbyists in Washington “aren’t looking out for you.” Eight years later, Trump crushed Hillary Clinton there.

On the trail, Harris has been feeding off the energy of her crowd as she highlights some of her stronger moments during the debate. In Charlotte, as she delved into Trump’s answer on whether he had a plan to replace the Affordable Care Act, some in the crowd interrupted her by shouting “Concepts! Concepts!”

“Oh, you all you watched the debate?” Harris said with a laugh to uproarious applause. “Concepts. Concepts. No actual plan — concepts,” she continued. “Understand what’s at stake on that. Forty-five million Americans are insured through the Affordable Care Act and he’s going to end it based on a concept.”

She also noted that Trump dodged a question about whether he’d sign a national abortion ban.

“Donald Trump refused to say that he would veto a national abortion ban. You remember that?” Harris asked. “He refused to answer that question, refused to answer that question. Well, I’m gonna tell you, when Congress passes a bill to restore reproductive freedom, as president of the United States, I will proudly, proudly sign it into law.”

Harris’s ready supply of cash has allowed her campaign to be nimble on the airwaves. Since her unexpected entrance into the race July 21, Harris’s effort has proved to be a fundraising juggernaut.

The $47 million that she raised in the 24 hours after the debate followed the news that her campaign raised $361 million in August, according to aides. That was nearly three times as much as the $130 million brought in by Trump’s coordinated effort.

Harris’s campaign said it entered September with $404 million in cash to spend compared with $295 million in cash for the Trump campaign.

But Jen O’Malley Dillon, the Harris-Walz campaign chair, wrote in a recent memo obtained by The Post that Democrats are facing structural hurdles that “will require us to continue aggressively raising money.”

She argued that the electoral college map this cycle benefits the Republican ticket that predicted the margins will be “razor-thin” in the battleground states.

“Every single battleground state is close, so we need to compete aggressively in every state in order to build a pathway to 270 electoral votes,” O’Malley Dillon wrote. “Playing in every battleground requires significant resources — for offices, organizers, TV ads, and other investments that keep these states in play.”

She argued that high-dollar donors such as Timothy Mellon will continue to seed pro-Trump super PACs with hundreds of millions of dollars that will be devoted, in part, to attacking Harris on the airwaves.

“New, billionaire-funded soft money groups are springing up at a rapid pace,” she wrote. “We have to keep our foot on the gas.”

Patrick Svitek contributed to this report.

From quite literally the moment Donald Trump descended on the country’s presidential campaigns in 2015, he has made misinformation and demagoguery about migrant crime his political calling card.

But even in that context, Trump’s comments about Haitian immigrants in Springfield, Ohio, purportedly eating pets break ground.

Relying on little more than the thinnest of rumors — and despite his claim being debunked to his face as tens of millions of Americans watched during Tuesday’s presidential debate with Vice President Kamala Harris — Trump has continued to train a spotlight on a very specific group of people in a very specific place. And he has declined to back down despite threats on Springfield’s city hall, a school and other buildings. Trump on Friday even pledged a mass deportation operation in Springfield, despite the Haitian immigrants being there legally.

Given the laughingstock this has become and the ugly concoction that is apparently brewing in Springfield, it’s worth asking: Why? It’s one thing to demagogue an issue; it’s another to do so in such a ridiculous and potentially dangerous way.

The apparent reason for the continued gambit is that it focuses attention on the issue Trump views as his political silver bullet: migrant crime. Springfield is, after all, a town that has recently seen a large influx of Haitian immigrants. If Trump’s version of events caught on, it could be employed as shorthand to justify his migrant crime strategy. And we’ve seen how Trump’s misinformation can catch on, despite all the fact-checking — at least with his devoted supporters.

But it’s not at all evident that this is nearly the electoral winner Trump seems to think it is. Besides the significant moral concerns, the downside is that Trump could undercut the entire enterprise by making a claim that is specific and debunkable enough to give lie to the rest of his migrant-crime rhetoric — at least with middle-of-the-road voters.

It’s been evident for a while that this is more than Trump repeating a rumor. It’s a campaign strategy. The strategy didn’t start with Trump, after all. His running mate, Sen. JD Vance (R-Ohio), first posted about it on Monday. (Vance before Tuesday’s debate conceded that the rumors might be wrong, just hours before Trump stated them as fact.)

It also flows from plenty of things Trump has said before.

This is a former president who, after all, effectively launched his political career by falsely casting Barack Obama as lying about his foreign birth. Trump launched his 2016 campaign by claiming Mexico was sending drugs, rapists and criminals across the U.S.-Mexico border. (“And some, I assume, are good people,” he added, suggesting those “good people” were a relatively small share.)

Trump has also targeted Haitians for particular derision, reportedly saying they “all have AIDS” and asking why we allow immigrants from “shithole countries” like Haiti. As the 2024 campaign has worn on, Trump has cast immigrants as a criminal scourge on our country — even as the evidence shows they commit less crime than native-born Americans.

Despite this long history, it’s not at all clear the approach has paid electoral dividends.

Yes, Trump won the 2016 election while playing up his border wall, but he also faced one of the most unpopular opponents in modern history, in Hillary Clinton. And every major election since then has proved disappointing for the GOP — including in 2022, when Republicans keyed on a border surge and crime as their potential game changers. (The president’s party almost always loses substantial ground in midterm elections, but Democrats had a historically good election against that backdrop.)

Just because Republicans didn’t win doesn’t mean these issues didn’t assist them. But there is little evidence that migrant crime is a pervasive concern for Americans.

There is no question that anti-immigrant sentiment surged amid record-setting illegal border crossings in recent years. Gallup data has shown a significant rise in the percentage of Americans who want immigration decreased. And as of June last year, 47 percent of Americans said migrants were making crime worse, vs. just 5 percent who said they were making it better.

But 47 percent isn’t a majority. And other data — while limited — suggests this isn’t a huge point of emphasis for Americans:

• A late 2022 PRRI poll showed only around one-third of Americans agreed at least “somewhat” with the idea that immigrants were increasing crime in local communities.
• A May Reuters-Ipsos poll showed just 22 percent said immigrants were more likely to be criminals than people born in the United States.
• And a March AP-NORC poll showed nearly 6 in 10 Americans said the risk of migrant crime was “minor” or “not a risk at all.” And just 3 in 10 thought immigrants were having any kind of “major impact” on their own communities — a number that suggests this might not be a top-tier personal concern even for many of those worried about it.

There’s also the fact that illegal border crossings have dropped sharply in recent months, to four-year lows, perhaps reducing the import of the broader issue.

That doesn’t mean these numbers won’t rise as Trump focuses like a laser on this issue. But it doesn’t exactly suggest this is a sleeping electoral giant of an issue, either.

It’s just as possible that Trump is running out of ideas, and so his strategy is to go back to the well, up the ante and the misinformation, and hope it turns out better for his party than it has before.

The potential downside is that the many Americans who aren’t predisposed to Trump’s version of migrant crime could see Trump’s misinformation for what it is and dismiss the rest of what he says about the subject.

And all the while, Springfield twists in the wind.