But the Trump campaign is fighting back! It released a new video on Instagram that showed footage of Clinton’s awful 1990s comment about “super-predators” and showed Bernie Sanders blasting the comment as “racist,” and reminded viewers that Clinton supported the 1994 crime bill. Trump released a second Instagram video that revived comments she made about Martin Luther King during the 2008 primaries that was criticized by African American elected officials and voters.

This comes after Trump repeatedly hit Clinton as a “bigot” and a “racist” yesterday, in advance of Clinton’s expected speech. As Josh Voorhees notes, Trump’s response to Clinton’s direct assault on his racism and bigotry is basically to say: I know you are, but what am I?

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This doesn’t seem like a particularly fair fight. On the one hand, just contrast all of the above videos. The Clinton one features footage of numerous Trump antics that took place in the last year: His exaggerated depictions of Black America as nothing but a full-blown zone of failure. His infamous moment at a rally in which he pointed and said, “look at my African American over here.” And his recent exhortation to blacks: “What the hell do you have to lose” if you vote for Trump? By contrast, the Trump videos highlight a two-decade-old remark (“super-predators”) for which Clinton has apologized, and an eight-year-old battle with Obama, who has endorsed her. As for the more recent episode involving Sanders, he, too, has endorsed her.

What’s more, as Voorhees also notes, there’s a strange disconnect in Trump’s messaging. He is the candidate of law and order, who delivered a nomination acceptance speech that painted a dire picture of skyrocketing crime and soaring homicide rates that was out of touch with current crime trends. Trump regularly depicts urban America as a war zone in a throwback manner that has little relation to present realities, and regularly inspires comparisons to Richard Nixon’s racially coded 1968 campaign, which Trump himself has said is his inspiration. Yet here he is attacking Clinton for using racially coded language in service of a tough-on-crime agenda, two decades ago? The message is just a big muddle.

The deepest imbalance of all in this debate centers on its real target audience. As Sahil Kapur reports today, Republican strategists say Trump’s attacks on Clinton as the “real racist” — and his gestures towards minority outreach and softening on mass deportations — aren’t aimed at African Americans at all, but rather are targeted to college educated whites and suburban swing voters. As one Republican puts it: “White suburban voters think he’s a racist or running a racist campaign. This is designed to make them feel like he is doing minority outreach even though the messaging is completely off-target. Racism comes up in almost all the verbatim polling and he’s getting creamed in the suburbs.”

The polling does suggest Trump is on defense on this question. This week’s Quinnipiac poll found that a majority of Americans think Trump “appeals to bigotry.” Note the responses from the groups among which Trump must improve: