Slurs, taunts, racist jokes, and sexually charged insults. They were all on full blast in New York City’s Madison Square Garden on Sunday during what was billed as the climactic Trump-Vance rally held in this campaign.

And yet, for all of the outrage that’s followed – particularly given the nastiness directed at Latinos in general and Puerto Ricans in particular – was there really any new ground broken by Trump and his minions?

The disgraced ex-president has been spewing venom and misogyny and outright lies since his first campaign announcement in 2015 in which he famously pronounced Mexicans to be killers and rapists with the broadest of broad brushes that he could muster. As president, he banned specific foreign nationals and ethnic groups from entering the US and labeled others as “shithole” countries.

He has elevated and validated malicious and dangerous falsehoods about Haitians. And, of course, he was among the birthers who with no evidence wrongly insisted that Barack Obama’s run for president in 2012 probably was illegitimate.

Trump’s white supremacist tendencies are well documented – going back to the 1980s, when he fueled a push to seek the death penalty for Black teens who were later proven to be innocent of assaulting a white jogger in Central Park. To this day, Trump persists in maligning those same men— even though they have been fully exonerated.

How is it, then, that so many Americans seem surprised by his latest round of slurs and lies? How has our electorate become so numb to all of this? It’s like a twisted sequel to the film “Groundhog Day,” in which each day the public awakes unbothered by the depravity of this charlatan candidate’s long record of transgressions and must be worn down anew by fresh takes of absurdity and abuse. It’s Puerto Ricans today. It was Haitians last week. Who will it be tomorrow? Pick a Black or Brown constituency and you can be well assured that you’ll be close to the target.

Reasonable people can disagree on matters of policy— from the efficacy of taxes versus tariffs, the security of our southern border and the influx of migrants, to the wisdom of aligning ourselves militarily with fledgling democracies in eastern Europe. But the Trumpist lurch toward isolationism and authoritarian rule should give all Americans pause, including, and perhaps especially, people who once saw themselves as traditional conservatives or as moderates.

We’ve been heartened to see many men and women of that ilk speak up forcefully and bravely in recent days.

Women like Liz Cheney, the former US Representative from Wyoming, who has called out Trump and his brand for what it is: a threat to our republic.

And men like four-star Marine Gen. John F. Kelly, Trump’s former chief of staff, who warned last week that his ex-boss’s instincts and world view “falls into the general definition of fascist.” Kelly, who saw the ex-president operate in the most intimate of moments in the Oval Office, told CNN that Trump “admires autocrats and murderous dictators. [He’s] a person that has nothing but contempt for our democratic institutions, our Constitution, and the rule of law.”

We wish that the choice in next Tuesday’s election was more nuanced and complicated. It’s not.

Alarmingly, it has become a referendum on whether this republic will preserve and protect its founders’ noblest ideals – or bend the knee to a singular cult fashioned in the likeness of a would-be dictator. For the sake of future generations, we pray that our fellow countrymen and women choose the former.

–Bill Forry