Read: “We’re all tired of being called racists”

For the Trump coalition, “an important part of their worldview is victimization and being aggrieved,” says the Democratic pollster Cornell Belcher, who has extensively studied attitudes on race relations. “This continues the victimization narrative.”

Trump’s insistence that he is not bigoted—and that critics such as Democratic Representative Elijah Cummings of Maryland are the real racists—echoes his response to the allegations of sexual misconduct against Supreme Court Justice Brett Kavanaugh during his contentious nomination in the fall. Trump responded to those accusations not by empathizing with women, but by declaring: “It is a very scary time for young men in America, where you can be guilty of something you may not be guilty of.”

Both then and now, Trump advanced the same argument: The problem isn’t discrimination against minorities or women pressing for equal treatment; it is that those groups are unfairly accusing white people and men of treating them inequitably.

Strategists in both parties, along with independent analysts, largely agree that Trump can energize his supporters by insisting that they are the actual victims of bigotry. But by motivating his core voters in that manner, Trump is utterly dismissing the concerns of the majority of Americans who now consistently describe him in polls as racist or racially insensitive. Like so many of Trump’s choices, that means his response to these accusations is likely to energize his base at the price of limiting his capacity to reach beyond it.

“I think the cost is, he doesn’t attract anybody new,” says Lynn Vavreck, a UCLA political scientist and a co-author of Identity Crisis, a book about the role of race in the 2016 presidential election. “And that could be a cost. The man won by 77,000 votes in three states. If African American turnout goes back to the Obama levels, he needs more voters. He could be fighting the last battle.”

Almost reflexively, Trump and his allies over the past few weeks have portrayed the charges that he is a racist not just as an attack on the president, but also as an attempt to intimidate and silence his supporters. Such arguments aim directly at the widespread belief among Trump voters that discrimination against white people is now as great a problem as racism against minorities.

In a study of the 2016 election published last year, the Tufts University political scientist Brian Schaffner and two of his colleagues found that the strongest predictor of support for Trump over Hillary Clinton was a belief that racism is no longer a systemic problem. Using results from a large-sample postelection survey called the Cooperative Congressional Election Study, they found that belief dwarfed economic concerns as a predictor of support for Trump. The conviction that discrimination against women is not a problem also proved a more powerful predictor of Trump support than economic concerns, though not as strong a factor as racial attitudes.