AS WITH many satellites orbiting Trump world, Omarosa Manigault-Newman’s exalted position in the White House defied explanation. She catapulted from a role of recurring villain on “The Apprentice”, Donald Trump’s reality-television series, to the seemingly important job of director of communications for the White House Office of Public Liaison. After an ignominious exit in January, she turned on her benefactor and published a tell-all book titled “Unhinged”. The most explosive and widely-circulated allegation made by Ms Manigault-Newman was that she possesses recordings of Mr Trump saying the N-word—America’s most heinous racial slur—while on the set of his series.

The president is no stranger to racial invective. He has launched broadsides from the bully pulpit against black and Hispanic political opponents, whom he labels “dogs” and “animals”; reportedly referred to African and Central American nations as “shithole” countries; and spoken of “very fine people on both sides” of a white-nationalist rally at which a counter-protester was killed. Nonetheless, for many Americans, such comments do not prove Mr Trump is a racist. A tape of him using the country’s most taboo word might well be enough to convince many of them.

How much would such a revelation hurt the president politically? He faced a similar situation in October 2016, when a recording surfaced of him bragging about groping women. His standing in the polls immediately fell, and most pundits pronounced his campaign dead. But he won the election one month later.

That pattern appears likely to repeat itself if a new tape does emerge. To assess its impact, The Economist included several questions on the use of the N-word in its recent survey of 1,500 Americans conducted by YouGov, a polling firm. The results confirm that most Trump voters would be unfazed: 77% of white Trump voters agreed that “it is possible that a person who uses the ‘N-word’ while in office can still be a good President of the United States”. Just 11% of whites who voted for Hillary Clinton said the same. By YouGov’s estimates, 47% of white Trump voters say that they could “definitely” or “probably” “support a presidential candidate whom you knew for a fact uses the ‘N-word’ to refer to a black/African American person”. Only 4% of white Clinton voters said the same, compared to 22% of American adults as a whole.

An even more striking finding is how often a word virtually never uttered in the public sphere seems to be used in private—and how comfortable Americans are admitting it, at least in an anonymous online survey. Fully 37% of white Trump voters admitted they had “used the ‘N-word’ to refer to a black/African American person”. Remarkably, even 20% of white Clinton voters did so as well. Given the social stigma associated with white people using the word, these figures are almost certainly underestimates.

The demographic profile of Americans who voted for Mr Trump in 2016 differs immensely from that of people who plumped for Hillary Clinton. Some of the differences in racial antipathy might be accounted for by these differences in background. But even after statistically controlling for a number of these demographic factors—such as age, income and education—we still found the presidential vote to be a leading predictor of whether a respondent used the N-word. Being male, older, and less educated were all associated with a greater probability of a white person admitting to saying it, but voting record remained highly salient as well. Consider a typical college-educated white male: our modelling suggests that one who voted for Trump would be 50% more likely to admit using the word than a Clinton voter would.

The 46% of voters who chose Mr Trump in 2016 are not all irredeemable racists, and as the YouGov poll shows, many whites who preferred Mrs Clinton use the word as well. Yet the data suggest that whereas people who already dislike the president might manage to despise him even more if an N-word tape appeared, most of the voters who sent him to the White House would be unfazed. Americans have elected numerous racistpresidents in the past. And to the extent that using the word is a proxy for racism, then the polling suggests they will be willing to continue doing so in the future.