What do Republican officials think of the nation’s roughly 4.5 million Muslims? No need to ask—they’ll just tell you.

“Muslims don’t belong in American society,” says Rep. Andy Ogles of Tennessee.

“No more Muslims immigrating to America,” says Rep. Brandon Gill of Texas.

“We need more Islamophobia, not less,” says Rep. Randy Fine of Florida.

“Every single Muslim holding public office in America is a trojan horse, and a threat to both national security and our republic,” says Rep. Nancy Mace of South Carolina.

“No more Muslims,” says Rep. Chip Roy of Texas.

“No more Islamic immigration,” says Rep. Andrew Clyde of Georgia. “Denaturalize, deport, repeat.”

Open bigotry toward Muslims is not just a way to get ahead in Donald Trump’s Republican party. Increasingly, it seems to be the purpose of Trump’s Republican Party.

“I hate Islam; it’s a demonic death cult,” says Lt. Gov. Micah Beckwith of Indiana.

“It is time to let your elected officials know exactly how you feel about the infiltration of Islam into our communities,” says Rep. Keith Self of Texas.

“We must IMMEDIATELY BAN all ISLAM immigrants and DEPORT every single Islamist who is living among us just waiting to attack,” says Sen. Tommy Tuberville of Alabama.

“Muslims need to be treated like enemy combatants,” says Laura Loomer, of Mar-a-Lago.

It’s a cliche, at this point, to suggest that if elected officials in this country talked about members of any other religious group the way they talk about Muslims they would be shunned from polite society—or at least called to account for it. But it’s hard to dispute the point. Open bigotry toward Muslims is not just a way to get ahead in Donald Trump’s Republican party. Increasingly, it seems to be the purpose of Trump’s Republican Party. It’s the key to understanding what’s changed in the MAGA world—and what has always been like this. The targeting and vilification of an American religious group is one of the most important stories of the midterms. We’re not talking about it enough.

I’ve been covering Islamophobia in politics at Mother Jones since Barack Obama’s first term, reporting on the rise of copycat anti-Shariah legislation in state legislatures in 2011 and a backlash to the construction of new Islamic centers. The most famous of these controversies was over the Park51 project in Lower Manhattan, which in the parlance of right-wing media became the “Ground Zero Mosque.” This boomlet was organized and well-funded, it had proponents in Congress and at think tanks and most definitely in the media, but it was also fundamentally grassroots. It was the thing people in power aren’t talking about enough. (In fact, some of these activists believed mainline Republican institutions like the American Conservative Union, which runs CPAC, had been captured by Islamists too.) This kind of Islamophobia was endemic to the Obama era—fusing conservative War on Terror tropes to conservative Black President tropes to conservative immigration tropes. Of the three, the first one evolved with the times; the second one faded; and the last one eventually dominated everything.

For a brief period, this kind of Islamophobia receded in salience a bit on the right. In 2013, I even wrote a piece about how the biggest Islamophobes had been banned from CPAC (accusing CPAC of being........

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