With Donald Trump’s latest racially tinged meltdown entering its fourth day, the watercooler conversation among the chattering class has returned to the age-old question: Is the president a racist, or does he just play one on TV? Perhaps, some have speculated, Trump is playing three-dimensional racist chess, riling up his conservative base while distracting the public from the manifold scandals plaguing his administration—including a potential impeachment inquiry.

According to the New York Times, however, there is no grand strategy—at least none that Trump staffers are aware of. At a senior staff meeting on Monday morning, several White House officials “expressed agreement” that the president’s tweets describing Baltimore as “rodent infested” and assailing black political figures were “a bad move.” And they “privately scoffed at the idea that it was strategy rather than impulse.”

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The source of that impulse is another question. Trump, of course, was for years one of the most vocal proponents of the racist birther conspiracy that President Barack Obama was not born in America (although former Trump campaign adviser Sam Nunberg has described this as a cynical political strategy too). He famously called for the execution of the Central Park Five, and continued to insist on their guilt even after they were exonerated by DNA evidence. As president, he sought to ban all Muslims from the United States and has suggested that four nonwhite congresswomen leave the country for criticizing him. The list goes on.

White House officials offer another explanation. “Three advisers said the president complained about Mr. [Elijah] Cummings throughout the weekend,” the Times reports. “Two of those advisers said the real source of his ire was the decision by the House Oversight and Reform Committee, which Mr. Cummings leads, to authorize subpoenas for all work-related texts and emails sent or received by Mr. [Jared] Kushner and Ivanka Trump, the president’s elder daughter and senior adviser, on personal accounts.”

It’s possible that Trump’s political frustrations with Cummings fueled his personal attacks on the black lawmaker and his majority black district. But it’s also true that Trump has made similar comments about black neighborhoods before. Trump’s former lawyer Michael Cohen told my colleague Emily Jane Fox about how when the two of them were driving through a rough neighborhood in Chicago, in the late 2000s, Trump remarked, “only the blacks could live like this.” Years later, as president, Trump would recoil again when facing a bipartisan plan to restore protections for immigrants from Haiti, El Salvador, and African countries. “Why are we having all these people from shithole countries come here?” he asked. The White House did not deny the remark. Cohen would later repeat his claim that Donald Trump is a “racist” under oath before Congress.

The pathology of Trump is such that he always hits back at his critics, and will always reach for whatever immutable characteristics he feels he can use against them—witness “sleepy” Joe Biden or “pencil-neck” Adam Schiff. When attacking women, Trump can be especially cruel, often making allusions to their weight or plastic surgery or menstruation. But when it comes to his black critics, from Cummings to Barack Obama himself, Trump is at his most vicious. The president's allies claim that his vehemence in these instances is purely race blind. But even a cursory review of the evidence, and Trump’s pattern of behavior, suggests otherwise.

Update: Trump says “There’s no strategy” to his attacks on Cummings.

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