WASHINGTON—In the morning, Donald Trump echoed the vocabulary of white supremacists. In the afternoon, he endorsed a fictional war crime against Muslims.

Trump’s allies have urged him to talk about jobs and tax reform. Instead, the president of the United States has decided to vigorously embrace the racial and religious animus that was central to his campaign success but has alienated and alarmed much of the country and the world.

His words in 2016 were extraordinary for a major-party candidate, and his words on Thursday were doubly shocking from a president. He triggered the latest round of outrage, moreover, as he was already six days into a self-created crisis over his beliefs about race.

“The president has options here,” Kevin Madden, former top spokesperson for Republican candidate Mitt Romney, said in an email. “One option is to allow his administration to become consumed by these controversies, the other is to refocus the message on the economic agenda, one rooted in jobs and growth. That first option is just not a viable one.”

On Thursday afternoon, Trump issued a relatively conventional condolence tweet in response to the Barcelona terrorist attack that has been claimed by Daesh (also known as the Islamic State). But 45 minutes later, he returned to anti-Muslim bigotry — asking people to research an invented U.S. massacre of Muslim terrorists with bullets dipped in pigs’ blood.

“Study what Gen. Pershing of the United States did to terrorists when caught,” Trump wrote on Twitter. “There was no more Radical Islamic Terror for 35 years!”

It would be remarkable even if the story were true: the president advocating extrajudicial killing, involving religious prejudice, as a method of deterring terrorism.

But the story is fake, historians say. Trump was citing an internet hoax that has circulated in email forwards since at least 2001.

“For a guy who keeps shouting ‘fake news, fake news, fake news,’ what does he do? He tweets fake news,” said Ibrahim Hooper, spokesman for the Council on American-Islamic Relations.

Anti-Muslim sentiment is one of Trump’s “core messages,” Hooper said. The persistence of Trump’s rhetoric, Hooper said, has “really created a sense of being under siege in the Muslim community.”

Trump did not elaborate, this time, on what the late Pershing supposedly did. But he told a detailed fable at a campaign rally in February 2016.

He claimed then that Pershing had executed 49 Muslim prisoners during the U.S. occupation of the Philippines in the early 1900s, adding religious insult by smearing the bullets with the blood of an animal observant Muslims are forbidden to consume.

Police in the northern Spanish city of Barcelona say a white van has jumped the sidewalk in the city's historic Las Ramblas district and crashed into a summer crowd of residents and tourists, injuring several people.

“And he had his men load his rifles, and he lined up the 50 people, and they shot 49 of those people,” Trump said. “And the 50th person, he said, ‘You go back to your people and you tell them what happened.’ And for 25 years there wasn’t a problem, OK? Twenty-five years there wasn’t a problem.”

Republican legislators criticized him more strongly than they had all year after the wild Tuesday press conference in which he blamed “both sides” for the Saturday violence at a white supremacist demonstration in Charlottesville, Va. and claimed there were “very fine people,” who merely wanted to protect a local statue of Confederate Gen. Robert E. Lee, marching alongside the neo-Nazis.

But Trump was unrepentant as ever. He leaned into the controversy Thursday morning, issuing a series of tweets in support of Confederate monuments — describing them not only as part of U.S. history but a “beautiful” part of U.S. “culture.”

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“The beauty that is being taken out of our cities, towns and parks will be greatly missed and never able to be comparably replaced!” he said.

Though it is common for Republican politicians to argue that Confederate monuments should be preserved as a matter of history, praise for the “culture” of the slaveholding South, and the “beauty” of secessionist leaders, is more commonly associated with white supremacists.

Trump’s comments were roughly in line with the inflammatory advice of chief strategist Steve Bannon. Bannon told the American Prospect magazine Tuesday that he wanted to keep Democrats talking about racism and “identity politics” while Trump presented a message of “economic nationalism.”

But Trump’s current message bears more resemblance to white nationalism than economic nationalism. As of Thursday evening, he had not spoken or tweeted this week about the NAFTA negotiations he initiated.

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