Ohio Governor Mike DeWine has written a remarkable piece in The New York Times taking Donald Trump and J.D. Vance to task for their demagoguery about the Haitian influx into Springfield, a small city in the western part of the state. This is striking—it’s rare for a governor to criticize the top of his party’s ticket quite this publicly.
But DeWine’s piece is worth dwelling on for another reason: It lays bare an essential truth about the Springfield controversy, and why the MAGA movement has seized on it so fervently. For Trump and key elements of MAGA, Springfield is not really about border security, or the proper pace of legal immigration, or how best to assimilate new arrivals. Rather, it’s a stand-in for a subterranean argument about the desirable ethnoracial makeup of the American population.