According to Trump, former Florida gubernatorial candidate Andrew Gillum was “a Dem who is a thief and who is Mayor of poorly run Tallahassee, said to be one of the most corrupt cities in the Country!” There is no evidence of theft by Gillum, and Tallahassee isn’t the most corrupt city.

According to Trump, legendary Congressman John Lewis’s district “is in horrible shape and falling apart.” It is not. PolitiFact rated Trump’s claim “mostly false.”

Even majority-black and majority-brown countries around the globe have been condemned and dismissed by Trump in this way. Haiti, El Salvador and African countries are “shithole countries.” Mexico has a “totally corrupt gov’t,” and it is sending “animals” and “rapists” across the border.

Yet he has lobbed praise at strongmen — mostly in Europe and Asia — for being great leaders. Think Russia and North Korea.

(Western nations have also piqued his anger when they have not been sufficiently ruthless with their minority populations. He said that Britain was “trying hard to disguise their massive Muslim problem,” and Germany “is going through massive attacks to its people by the migrants allowed to enter the country.” But Trump still maintains “a great feeling for Germany.” That feeling is apparently so great that he keeps lying that his father, Fred Trump, was born there, like he did again this week. Fred Trump was born in New York.)

To me, this marking of minorities as incapable of good governance harkens back to the Reconstruction period, when white supremacists promoted racist caricatures of newly elected black legislators acting uncouth as a way to fuel an angry backlash. This shows up in newspaper illustrations and in the film “The Birth of a Nation,” in which black legislators — eating, drinking and some without shoes — are shown in a state of chaos.

These white supremacists, many wealthy and powerful, used the threat of “black domination” to scare poorer whites into allegiance, warning them of race-mixing, miscegenation and the rape of white women and girls. They also warned about the crude attempt of black people to be civilized and judicious.