Honest question, in the era of President Donald Trump: How bigoted does a candidate have to be to lose the support of the Republican Party?



Seth Grossman, a Republican running for Congress in South Jersey, has long been spouting racist nonsense. He says the disadvantages blacks have faced throughout U.S. history have been "exaggerated."



He argues blacks haven't faced any real discrimination in the North since the 1920's, and their real problem is laziness. "That is what is killing the African-American community, the idea that you can succeed without work, without achievement," he said, "just because you can say, 'Well, my great-great-granddaddy was treated unfairly."

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He's suggested that whites were to thank for ending slavery: "America didn't create slavery. However, 350,000 mostly white Americans died to end it more than 150 years ago." He's said diversity is "crap," and leads to Muslims killing Christians, and called Islam a cancer. And so on.



It's all publicly documented. But not until Monday did the national Republican committee chair finally drop him.



The state chair, Doug Steinhardt, denounced Grossman's "racist and bigoted speech" and said Wednesday, "Seth has never asked for our support. If he called me today and asked for it, the answer would be no."

But as recently as June, Steinhardt was cheerleading for Grossman, calling him a "proven winner."

And the Atlantic County chair, Keith Davis, continues to defend Grossman, insisting, "the man doesn't have a racist bone in his body." Really?



The last straw for the national chair, Rep. Steve Stivers, was Grossman sharing an article on Facebook from a white-nationalist website, written by someone claiming to be a "public defender in a large southern metropolitan area."



"Blacks are different by almost any measure to all other people," it read. "They cannot reason as well. They cannot communicate as well. They cannot control their impulses as well. They are a threat to all who cross their paths, black and non-black alike."



Above this 2014 post - recently highlighted by the liberal watchdog group Media Matters - Grossman wrote, "Oy vay! What so many people, black, white and Hispanic, whisper to me privately but never dare say out loud publicly."



In defense of Grossman, Davis, the county chair, argued, alternatively, that the man didn't actually read the article, and that he wrote "oy vay" to express his "disgust" with it. "He did not say mazel tov," Davis said. "He said oy vey."



Right. Davis also said he has not "scrutinized each and every comment" Grossman has made, but he is certain the man is not a bigot, because his views are very well known among local Republicans, as "someone who's been very controversial in Atlantic City politics for many years."



On Wednesday, Grossman reiterated that he was tricked into posting the article, because it was also shared by former Republican Rep. Allen West, who is black. "I got duped by a clever racist piece," he said.



He also told an editorial writer that he was hungry and cranky, the same excuse he used after an earlier video surfaced of him calling diversity "crap." He's right about one thing, though: It is disingenuous of the National Republican Congressional Committee to drop him now. His racism has been obvious for a long time.



It was essentially arm-twisted into this, having previously censured another GOP official - an RNC committeeman from Michigan - after he shared the exact same 2014 post on Facebook. What about everything else Grossman has said?



Exactly how bigoted does a candidate have to be to lose official support? Davis won't say.



"County chairmen have been telling me that they're getting calls from outside the district, asking them to disassociate themselves with me, and I'm very proud of the fact that so far, they're holding firm," Grossman said.



The national GOP chair, Stivers, put out a statement that "Bigotry has no place in society -- let alone the U.S. House of Representatives."



But apparently, there's still plenty of room left in the Republican party.