Hello, it's the weekend. This is The Weekender ☕

It's odd to be in a lull amid a campaign as truncated and breakneck as this one. 

The debate on Tuesday was the most significant campaign moment left on the calendar. Kamala Harris swept the floor with Donald Trump, as evidenced by the hordes of Republicans vacillating between insisting he won anyway, and that the moderators rigged it for Trump. 

And now, we wait to see how much it mattered. Joe Biden's debate performance upended conventional wisdom about their importance, leaving us stranded in a place between what we once believed and what the new reality is. We're still likely days out from quality polling that'll indicate what bump, if any, Harris will get from her performance. 

It's a calcified country, and any bump is likely to be modest. But this is a race where most of the states that get to pick the next president are divided by less than a point. Progress, even incremental progress, matters. And so, as the campaign and hours-long news cycles rage on, we wait.

Here's what else TPM has on tap this weekend:

• Josh Kovensky unpacks Trump's latest escalation of the manufactured crisis he and his running mate helped create in Springfield, Ohio. 
• Khaya Himmelman reports on the recent pledge that a bipartisan group of centrist lawmakers signed, vowing to certify the results of the 2024 election ... no matter what chaos their colleagues and Trump allies attempt to sow.
• Emine Yücel unpacks the backlash Trump's received for bringing far-right conspiracy theorist and online racist Laura Loomer into his inner circle.
• Emine Yücel also weighs in on the on-the-ground ramifications of Trump's dog-eating rhetoric.

Let's dig in. 

It's been a big week for Springfield, Ohio.

Sen. JD Vance (R-OH) escalated his summer-long attempt to drag the city into the GOP's anti-immigration campaign by both spreading the rumor that Haitians in the town were devouring pets and by referencing the death of a child last year in a car accident for which a Haitian immigrant was found responsible. Both ended in the latter, the child's parents begged Vance and Trump to stop using his death as a "political tool."

Everyone I've spoken to in Springfield wants this to end. That includes the Haitians, who are concerned for their own well-being and hurt that they now face invective on a national scale. Others, including local anti-immigrant advocates, have said that it's gone too far as well.

It's the product of a back-and-forth between Vance, other Trump campaign officials, and underground hate groups. We've seen it play out before, but Springfield is a particularly stark example: a national politician, in this case Vance, will train the far right's focus on a specific issue or place. Extremist groups will seize on the situation, giving it more attention. And, in this case, Vance and Trump poured more fuel on the fire by spreading outrageous, dehumanizing lies about the community. So it goes.

Trump himself launched the latest volley of escalation on Friday, pledging that if he wins, Springfield will be one of the first American cities to see mass deportations.

"We will do large deportations from Springfield, Ohio. Large deportations. We're gonna get these people out," Trump said before adding, incomprehensibly: "We're bringing them back to Venezuela." Trump may have confused the Haitians in Springfield with a separate panic around Venezuelans in Aurora, Colorado.

Pay no mind to that. In terms of policy, he may be serious. I've spent part of this summer talking with immigration policy experts and former officials. That's partly because of the intensity of the rhetoric and capaciousness of the Trump campaign's plans to deport if they win. The government lacks the resources to achieve anything remotely approaching the kind of national, total deportation campaign that Trump has envisioned. But what experts have suggested to me is that a Trump-run federal government could try to stoke fear among undocumented immigrants by picking one, high-profile town and conducting a mass deportation campaign there. In the case of the Haitians, it could be a policy determined by the executive branch that Trump could end relatively easily and quickly should he win in November.

A group of bipartisan lawmakers signed a pledge this week vowing to certify the results of the election and to "safeguard the fairness and integrity of America's democratic process" following the 2024 election, according to reporting from Politico. 

The pledge involves a commitment to the following: Acknowledging the winner of the election as the legitimate president, attending the inauguration ceremony in-person, and "serving as a voice for calm and reconciliation and speaking out against those who endorse or engage in violence that harms people, property, or public spaces."

"After this election, America will have the rule of the mob unless the commonsense majority stands up. It's never been more critical for our leaders to embrace the enduring idea that America is and must always be one nation," the pledge reads. 

It's a bipartisan effort to guard against the chaos and violence that broke out four years ago when Republican members of Congress refused to certify the results, on the same day that Trump supporters stormed the Capitol. None of the Republicans who signed on to the agreement voted against certifying the results in 2020. 

The pledge comes against the backdrop of a larger effort by election deniers to find ways to potentially delay certification of the results.

In Georgia, the MAGA-controlled state election board recently approved two rules that give county election officials a new power to potentially delay certification and sow seeds of chaos into the election system. One of the rules gives county officials the power to not certify election results until a "reasonable inquiry" into any discrepancies in the voting process at the county level have been conducted. 

Another rule, also approved last month, states that in the event of a discrepancy between the ballot count and the number of voters, the election cannot be certified until the board investigates the discrepancy. The rule also gives election board members the power "to examine all election-related documentation before certifying the results." 

Both rules are particularly worrying because they give election deniers the opportunity to hold up the certification process with baseless claims of fraud.

Far right activist and conspiracy theorist Laura Loomer has been in the spotlight for her racist comments, as well as, what appears to be, a recently rejuvenated relationship with Donald Trump this week. And it's sparked all kinds of drama.

On Tuesday, Loomer attended the presidential debate and reportedly traveled on the former president's private plane with him. The next day, while attending the 9/11 remembrance ceremony in New York City, Trump brought Loomer, who has previously pushed extreme conspiracy theories about the terrorist attacks being "an inside job," to the event alongside him.

And as if that was not enough, just days before, Loomer posted on X saying that the White House will "smell like curry" if Harris wins the presidential election.

You can imagine the uproar it's sparked. 

At a press conference on Thursday, House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries (D-NY) condemned Trump for bringing Loomer to the event, calling the decision "shocking, irresponsible, and offensive."

"The fact that on Sept. 11, this sacred day, he would bring a 9/11 conspiracy theorist to participate in events during this solemn commemoration should shock the conscience of all decent Americans," Jeffries said.

But Democrats aren't the only ones enraged to hear Trump is hanging out with Loomer.

"I think that the president would serve himself well to make sure this doesn't become a bigger story," Sen. Lindsay Graham (R-SC) told HuffPost on Thursday.

"We have policy disagreements but the history of this person is just really toxic," he added.

Loomer is such a divisive figure amongst Republicans that even the conspiracy loving Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-GA) condemned Loomer and her recent X post, calling it "appalling and extremely racist."

"I don't know much about that relationship, but I've been very disturbed by many of her comments," Greene said in an interview, referring to Loomer hanging out with the former president. "I don't think she belongs with him."

Greene might just be jealous she's being replaced by Loomer in Trump's entourage but either way, Loomer is officially on Trump's list of problems.

When asked on Friday about the fact that some of his allies are concerned about his relationship with Loomer, Trump beat around the bush.

"Laura's been a supporter of mine just like a lot of people are supporters," Trump said. "I don't control Laura. Laura has to say what she wants. She is a free spirit .. I can't tell Laura what to do."

That's obviously former President Donald Trump saying what we all witnessed during the presidential debate this week when he falsely claimed that Haitian immigrants in Springfield, Ohio are eating cats and dogs.

As soon as Trump uttered those words on live TV, "they're eating the dogs" started trending on X and generated almost 270,000 posts as of Wednesday afternoon, according to Forbes. Memes mocking the former president's ridiculous claim quickly took over social media. If you missed them you can see some of them: here, here and here. People even started making songs out of the viral moment.

All jokes aside, Trump's remarks from the presidential debate have had very serious consequences.

On Thursday, less than two days after the debate, there were reports of several city, county and school buildings around Springfield getting closed down because of a bomb threat "to multiple facilities throughout Springfield," according to the Springfield News-Sun. And on Friday, Springfield City School District said they evacuated two elementary schools. 

When people say Trump is a threat to this country, well … this is only a small example of what that looks like.