It’s not ending with Trump. Now we’re under attack from his clones

Of all the weird things occurring in the US right now ( Measles are back ! Cold War with Canada !) one of the strangest has been the rise of the Trump clones.

Their origin dates back to 2016. As the then Republican front-runner for the presidential nomination, Trump infamously declared that “I could stand in the middle of Fifth Avenue and shoot somebody and I wouldn’t lose any voters. It’s, like, incredible.”

Marvelling at the prospect of engaging in criminal behaviour while retaining electability, Trump went on to prove his hypothesis, notching up convictions for sexual assault and defamation and 34 counts of falsifying business records in a hush money case involving his affair with a porn star. He was then elected president again.

Now, as the US heads towards November midterm elections, Trump’s revelation that acts of violence, immorality and criminality no longer preclude running for public office has seemingly become normalised. It’s now incredible if a candidate running for office in the US doesn’t have a skeleton in the closet. Or tattooed to his chest, as in the case of the former Democratic Senate candidate for Maine, Graham Platner, whose skull-and-crossbones tattoo, which closely resembled the Nazi Totenkopf, caused a minor furore. Fortunately for Platner, these days there’s a higher tolerance for white supremacist-adjacent tattoos among holders of high office in the US, (as evinced by Secretary of War, Pete Hegseth’s ink ), so it wasn’t until allegations of sexual assault were made against him that Platner finally exited the race in July.

Referring to the situation in Maine, conservative commentator Greg Price, wrote on X: “It’s truly hysterical how Democrats can’t seem to find one normal dude to run for office”, which would have been a solid partisan burn about the importance of candidate quality control in the midterm elections, if only Brandon Herrera and Ken Paxton didn’t exist.

Herrera is a Republican candidate running for congress in Texas. A gun influencer who boasted about owning a copy of Mein Kampf , Herrera has made jokes about using homeless people for target practice and has referred to women as “fat bitches” and “whores”. In a video , Herrera refers to the Nazi submachine gun he is wielding as the “original ghetto blaster” and “Hitler’s street sweeper”. He also coined a vulgar epithet for children , which is unprintable. It’s a measure of the current “When he goes low, we go lower” standard set by Trump that Herrera is running as the Trump-endorsed candidate for the GOP: the same party that only days ago at the Republican convention in Dallas, Vice President JD Vance positioned as the champion of family values.

Meanwhile, Ken Paxton, the Republican Texas Attorney General and Trump-endorsed Senate candidate, is facing a formidable opponent; not the Democrat candidate, James Talarico, but rather himself. As The New York Times reported , Paxton has been “indicted on charges of felony securities fraud and impeached ...