Read: Trump’s base isn’t enough

While Trump has been more explicit about this in the past few days, he’s brought a heightened focus to racial issues for much of the past month. Consider the two major domestic-policy questions of the past four weeks: a citizenship question on the census and border policy.

On June 27, nine days after the Florida speech, the Supreme Court ruled against the Trump administration’s effort to place a question about U.S. citizenship on next year’s census. Though the justices left an ostensible legal path to try again, the government acknowledged there wasn’t time to continue the fight and add the question, and it signaled that it would abandon the effort, both in court proceedings and in a statement from Commerce Secretary Wilbur Ross. But Trump insisted on a fight anyway, forcing reluctant Justice Department attorneys to restart their fight and threatening an executive order to place the question on the census.

Then, one week ago, he announced a surrender (which, naturally, he framed as a win) on the citizenship question. To summarize, Trump spent two weeks framing a national conversation over citizenship, even though his own aides had already explained to him that it wouldn’t result in the question being included. It was all performative, an effort to show his voters that he wanted to have this fight and wouldn’t back down.

The other ongoing battle has been over immigration. Of course, this is not new, but the past month has seen revelations of how bad conditions are in camps where migrants are being held, both from observers and from a Department of Homeland Security inspector general’s report. Reports have also revealed stomach-churning social-media groups of Customs and Border Patrol staffers.

In the face of these revelations, the Trump administration has questioned the credibility of those reports, attacked the reporters, and recommitted itself to pursuing the same course. On Monday, the administration announced new rules for asylum seekers that immigrant-rights advocates say violate federal law and international treaties, while Politico reports Friday that the White House wants to reduce the quota for refugees in 2020 to effectively zero. Whether these rules actually go into place may be, like the border wall, somewhat beside the point. They are more important to Trump as political rhetoric than as policy, and the rhetoric is focused on race.

On foreign policy, Trump has quietly made several consequential policy steps that push the U.S. away from confrontations with adversaries and distance it from allies. He seems to have surrendered any hope of denuclearizing North Korea, as he once promised, and after talking tough at Tehran, has opted (so far) to ratchet down tensions with Iran, even calling back an attack 10 minutes before the strike, according to his account. Yet Trump also effectively forced the resignation of the United Kingdom’s ambassador to the United States over (accurate) comments he made in private cables that were leaked.