Donald Trump's flailing debate performance encapsulated one of the Republican Party’s key vulnerabilities: Its message is dictated by the deranged fixations of conspiracy-minded propagandists.

Trump wasted a rare opportunity to speak to a broad swath of the nation on Tuesday night, instead repeatedly parroting talking points coherent only to viewers familiar with the deep lore of the Fox News Cinematic Universe and the right-wing online fever swamps. 

He promoted a viral, racist lie about Haitian immigrants stealing and eating housepets in Ohio, falsely claimed Democrats like Vice President Kamala Harris support “execution after birth,” baselessly accused the FBI of “defrauding” data showing that violent crime has fallen, and much more.

Not everyone on the right is happy about this.

But Trump’s echoing of the “STUPID SHIT” pushed by his sycophants represents a continuation of an unfortunate trend in his party. 

Republican leaders spent decades telling their supporters that mainstream journalists could not be trusted and urging them to get their information from the parallel network of right-wing propagandists they propped up instead. Over time, that information bubble became ever-more-seamless, even as the weirdos it empowered pushed the party in bizarre directions that normal people find deeply off-putting. 

It was evident as early as the 2012 election cycle that GOP politicians were following their base into that right-wing media bubble, but Trump dramatically accelerated that process during and after his term in the White House. 

A fervent Fox fan, Trump spent hours a day as president watching and tweeting about the network’s coverage and relied on Fox’s star hosts as key outside advisers. 

Since leaving office, he’s still been posting a steady stream of Fox clips to Truth Social. But he’s also waded deeper into the right-wing swamp, promoting an array of even fringier denizens of the MAGA movement, including QAnon adherents with violent fantasies.

Republican politicians who aspired to climb the rungs of power followed Trump into the bubble, seeking to appeal to the party’s conspiracy theorists by aping their hard-edged style and paranoid obsessions. 

Some Trump allies are responding to his debate debacle by blaming the presence of Laura Loomer — an arch-conspiracy theorist and Trumpist zealot — on the former president’s plane as he arrived in Philadelphia. 

But Trump himself appears to be retreating ever-deeper into the bubble. He followed up his debate performance by returning to the familiar embrace of Fox News, giving interviews both to his loyal adviser, Fox host Sean Hannity, and to his loyal partisans on Fox & Friends. 

During the latter appearance, he suggested that ABC should be stripped of its broadcast license over the actions of the network’s moderators. He also floated his preferred moderator options for a debate rematch: Hannity or his fellow pro-Trump Fox hosts Laura Ingraham or Jesse Watters.