There’s a pandemic going on, but because there’s no bad time to call President Trump and his supporters racist, Thomas Edsall of the New York Times is out with a new column that asks, in earnest, “How Racist Is Trump’s Republican Party?”

Because Edsall is smart enough not to attach his own credibility to such an astoundingly offensive question, he farmed it out to a bunch of college professors and political scientists to kick around.

The result was exactly what you might expect — each of the experts defined racism specifically as the belief that certain races are inherently superior to others.

Just kidding! Edsall’s experts started that way, but it wasn’t long before you got to the part where racism is actually whatever liberals want it to be.

“My overall point is that we have forgotten what racism means,” Notre Dame political science professor Darren Davis told Edsall. “In doing so, we have focused attention on bigots and white nationalists and not held ordinary citizens accountable for beliefs that achieve the same ends.”

What’s an example of that? According to a Northwestern University professor, “President Trump’s or Steve King’s comments about certain types of immigrants being unassimilable or not sufficiently American and suggesting that other (e.g. white) immigrants do not have those characteristics.”

This is another way of saying that any criticism, complaint, or even recommendation on immigration is by its very nature racist.

This is another way of saying that if you believe in locking up criminals, putting limits on welfare, demanding standards on foreigners admitted into the country, you’re racist.

“Racist” has no actual meaning anymore because it means everything. That’s mostly by design, as the social justice ideology has made it less a term for describing someone’s attitudes and more so a weapon to use against anyone deemed to benefit from some unspecified “privilege.”

That’s why no one so much as blinks when the New York Times runs a column not asking if the president and his supporters (nearly half the country) are racist, but just how racist are they?

Oh, and because there’s never a bad time to call Trump a racist.