It has been a week since what President Donald Trump ominously dubbed the “election of the … caravan,” but nobody in the White House or Republican Party seems to be talking about the caravan anymore. This despite the imminent threat both spent weeks insisting the 7,000 Central American migrants traveling through Mexico posed. “Mexico’s Police and Military are unable to stop the Caravan heading to the Southern Border of the United States,” the president tweeted on October 22. “I have alerted Border Patrol and Military that this is a National Emergy [sic]. Must change laws!”

Trump was not alone in his outcry. Vice-President Mike Pence phoned Honduran president Juan Orlando Hernández to ascertain details about the caravan’s origins, then told reporters on October 23 that “leftist groups” and Venezuela were funding it. Trump accused the Democrats of bankrolling its movements, while U.S. Representative Matt Gaetz claimed liberal billionaire George Soros was behind it. The president stated, without evidence, that “[criminals] and unknown Middle Easterners [were] mixed in.” Former ICE acting director Thomas Homan told Fox News, “[Border Patrol agents] will defend this line … Thank God we got a president sitting in the White House who … has [their] backs.”

There were, of course, no known criminals or “Middle Easterners” mixed in, nor was the caravan a national emergency. The fear-mongering that marked Trump’s response to the migrants — many of whom were women and children, and most of whom were fleeing violence and economic hardship in Honduras — was a transparent effort to scare Republican voters. It appears to have been successful in this regard. “What’s to stop them?” Carol Shields, a Republican in northern Minnesota, told the New York Times in October. “We have a lot of people who live on lakes in the summer and winter someplace else. When they come back in the spring, their house would be occupied.” But if the goal was to land a knockout punch on vulnerable Democrats in red states, it was less so. Trump singled out Senator Jon Tester at a Montana rally as an “open borders” proponent, which was a lie. Tester won reelection anyway.

It seems unavoidable, at this point, that Trump did not actually believe the caravan was a threat of the magnitude he once claimed. It is significantly closer to the U.S. now, but he has discussed it just once publicly since Election Day, despite tweeting about it at least six times beforehand and bringing it up several more times at rallies and press conferences. He alluded to it in a November 9 proclamation limiting entry for certain asylum seekers. But the bigger fallout from his efforts is still being felt. The troop surge he ordered to the border to stop the “onslaught” looks increasingly like a political stunt with no military value. And the October 28 massacre at a Pittsburgh synagogue by a man claiming the caravan was a Jew-engineered invasion has left a community terrorized and 11 families mourning dead loved ones.