In a shocking new development—OK, it was entirely predictable—the mayor of Springfield, Ohio has now confirmed that the widely reported threat by email to bomb Springfield’s City Hall included hateful language toward immigrants. This suggests at least the possibility that MAGA’s Two-Minute Hate of the Week about Haitians eating people’s house pets helped incite a threat of mass violence.

Which raises a question: Will Donald Trump, J.D. Vance, and their merry band of MAGA propagandists stop pushing such vile demagoguery about immigrants, now that there’s cause for real concern that this latest iteration could end up getting people hurt or even killed?

Of course they won’t.

An underappreciated aspect of this sorry saga is that Trump and Vance constantly rhapsodize about places like Springfield, a small metro region in the heartland that has wrestled with postindustrial stagnation and population decline. Yet all of a sudden—and we see this again and again—they are almost pathologically unconcerned with the real-world harms their demagoguery is visiting on the people who live there, including the ones they regard as Real Americans.

Springfield Mayor Rob Rue’s latest comments on the bomb threat illustrate the point. He told the local ABC News affiliate that there was “negative language toward immigrants” in the threat email, including “towards Haitian folks.” That was “followed up” with the “bomb threat,” Rue said.

Rue was also asked whether he fears Trump’s elevation of MAGA’s shiny new lie at the presidential debate—he ranted wildly that in Springfield, immigrants are “eating the dogs” and “eating the cats”—is linked to the bomb threat. Rue didn’t answer directly, but he said something remarkable.

“When a federal politician has the stage,” Rue said, “and they don’t take the opportunity to build up the community, instead of inadvertently not understanding what their words are........

© New Republic