On a North Carolina tarmac last week, President Donald Trump reminded the country that MAGA’s preferred version of America is one from a bygone era.

The occasion was a rally to bolster U.S. Senate candidate Michael Whatley (R), who trails the Democratic nominee Roy Cooper consistently in polls and risks a loss that could cost Republicans the majority. Rather than outline a vision for tomorrow, Trump’s pitch leaned on the party’s most shopworn frameworks: law and order’s tough-on-crime posturing, the Southern Strategy’s exploitation of racial division, and the infamous intersection of the two — the Willie Horton ad, which first aired 38 years ago this week.

Trump spent most of the night attacking Cooper, the former governor, over a court-ordered settlement to reduce the state’s prison population during the covid-19 pandemic. He likened it to the Massachusetts prison furlough of Horton, a Black man convicted of murder and rape whose crimes became a central issue in the 1988 presidential election. In a commercial that’s now a cornerstone of dog-whistle politics, a Republican-affiliated PAC sought to gain ground on Democratic nominee and governor Michael Dukakis by pinning Horton’s violent spree on him. It worked. “Dukakis took a rousing lead of 15 points,” Trump told the crowd, “and lost the election in the landslide because of that one........

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