After telling minority members of Congress to go back to where they “came from,” Trump today accused the women of “foul language & racist hatred.” White nationalists in the United States have always asserted that they are, in fact, the true victims of racial hatred, even as they’ve demanded the exclusion of nonwhites from the polity. When the Confederacy was shattered, its partisans launched a propaganda campaign rewriting the origin of their rebellion as the defense of individual freedom rather than property in man. The Redeemers who overthrew Reconstruction with terrorism and violence portrayed themselves as the victims of Negro tyranny, and as the historian Jason Sokol has written, when de jure segregation unraveled in the South in the 1960s, white southerners “began to picture the American government as the fascist, and the white southerner as the victim.”

Indeed, Trump’s remarks about the representatives followed a week in which he unsuccessfully attempted to overturn a Supreme Court decision that hobbled an administration effort to use the census to expand white voting power. The president’s remarks about Omar, Ocasio-Cortez, Pressley, and Tlaib are not only consistent with that effort; they provide its moral foundation. Yet the president’s rejoinder that his targets are the real racists will resonate with the voters in his base, the overwhelming majority of whom believe that they are the true victims of discrimination, and who are likely to see criticism of the president’s remarks as an affirmation of their own victimhood.

Adam Serwer: The cruelty is the point

Trump’s supporters offered feeble, incoherent attempts at defending his remarks. “Clearly it’s not a racist comment,” Representative Andy Harris of Maryland, a Republican, told a Baltimore radio station, according to The Washington Post. “He could have meant, ‘Go back to the district they came from, to the neighborhood they came from.’” The Fox News personality Brit Hume argued that “Trump’s ‘go back’ comments were nativist, xenophobic, counterfactul and politically stupid. But they simply do not meet the standard definition of racist, a word so recklessly flung around these days that its actual meaning is being lost.” A Trump-campaign official, Matt Wolking, declared on Twitter that “anyone who says the president told members of Congress to go back to where they came from is lying.”

These defenses are comical. The president clearly said “country” in his tweet telling the representatives to “go back”; the remark assumes that the citizenship of the representatives is conditional because of their ethnic backgrounds; and Wolking’s defense requires ignoring the president’s own words. But self-deceit is, in a sense, necessary for the president’s advocates: To reconcile the America they say they believe in with the one they actually do believe in, they cannot be honest with themselves about what the president actually said.