Read: An oral history of Trump’s bigotry

Many contradictions are at play in Trump’s remarks—his political rise was based on critiquing perceived flaws in American society, and now he is portraying the same dissent as beyond the pale. Of course, the key difference is that he is white, whereas (say) Representative Ayanna Pressley is not.

But parallels with 2016 go only so far. During his first presidential campaign, Trump openly pitted immigrants against American citizens, while ostensibly seeking the votes of African Americans and Latinos. “What the hell do you have to lose?” Trump asked on the trail. (In fact, Trump’s campaign was seeking to depress turnout in these groups, realizing that while minorities wouldn’t vote for him, they might not vote for Hillary Clinton either.)

Trump is now doing something different. By attacking the black and brown women of the squad, he is not just pitting citizen against immigrant, but citizen against citizen. This is a significant shift. Politicians from Richard Nixon to Bill Clinton have seen the utility of coded racial appeals to white voters, but over time they have also calculated that these appeals must be coded or else the political cost will outweigh the benefit. The late Republican strategist Lee Atwater captured the dynamic in an infamous 1981 quote:

You start out in 1954 by saying, “Nigger, nigger, nigger.” By 1968 you can’t say “nigger”—that hurts you, backfires. So you say stuff like, uh, forced busing, states’ rights, and all that stuff, and you’re getting so abstract. Now, you’re talking about cutting taxes, and all these things you’re talking about are totally economic things and a byproduct of them is, blacks get hurt worse than whites … “We want to cut this,” is much more abstract than even the busing thing, uh, and a hell of a lot more abstract than “Nigger, nigger.”

Trump is going in the opposite direction. By now, one would be only slightly surprised to hear the president simply use the N-word. Perhaps he’s saving that until the general election.

The open embrace of racism as a political strategy is, however, a natural progression from the 2016 campaign. While the president’s bigotry in the first campaign was instinctive, a reflection of his long-held and -lived convictions, it also served a political purpose. He and his advisers understood the appeal it would have. After the violent white-supremacist march in Charlottesville, Virginia, in August 2017, Trump praised “very fine people on both sides,” causing a firestorm.

Yoni Appelbaum: Trump should go back to where he came from

But Trump’s chief strategist, Steve Bannon, told The New York Times he actually welcomed attacks on the president as a bigot. “The race-identity politics of the left wants to say it’s all racist,” Bannon said. “Just give me more. Tear down more statues. Say the revolution is coming. I can’t get enough of it.” Bannon was almost immediately pushed out of the White House, but his vision persisted.