President Trump has done nothing for his white working-class voters. His signature tax cut was a giveaway to powerful business interests and wealthy heirs. His trade wars have forced farmers into dire economic straits. His White House is more interested in cutting food stamps than lifting wages. The economy is growing and unemployment is low, but that has as much to do with the previous administration as it does with anything he’s done.

To obscure his indifference to these voters, Trump has turned up the heat on his racism. Two weekends ago, he attacked four congresswomen of color, telling them to “go back” to the “totally broken and crime infested places from which they came.” And this past weekend, he went after Representative Elijah Cummings of Maryland, an African-American congressman from Baltimore.

“Rep. Elijah Cummings has been a brutal bully, shouting and screaming at the great men & women of Border Patrol about conditions at the Southern Border, when actually his Baltimore district is FAR WORSE and more dangerous. His district is considered the Worst in the USA,” the president wrote on Twitter, calling it a “disgusting, rat and rodent infested mess” and saying that if Cummings “spent more time in Baltimore, maybe he could help clean up this very dangerous & filthy place.”

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White House officials dispute this, and Trump himself denies it, but these remarks were clearly racist. The president singled out a black lawmaker, associated him with vermin, and characterized a majority-black area as dysfunctional and unfit for human existence. It was the same sentiment he expressed during the 2016 campaign when he described black neighborhoods as “war zones.” And it echoes what he reportedly told Michael Cohen, his former lawyer, when they were driving through a low-income Chicago neighborhood: “Only the blacks could live like this.”