President Trump’s two-fer on Friday night—attacking both CNN’s Don Lemon and NBA superstar LeBron James in a single tweet—has revived criticism that he’s a racist. No doubt you made up your mind on this—one way or the other—a long time ago. But let’s dig deeper here.

The tweet, which sparked a Twitter firestorm over the weekend, comes days before the first anniversary of Charlottesville. In case your mind’s a blur from all that’s happened over the past 12 months, the Virginia city was the site of a white supremacist and white nationalist rally, featuring mostly young men carrying torches, waving Confederate battle flags, swastikas, anti-Semitic banners—and “Trump-Pence” signs. They were met by counter-protestors, and one of them, a 32-year-old woman, was killed when a 20-year old white nationalist plowed his car into her. Two state troopers also died when their helicopter, which had been assisting local police, crashed later in the day.

Trump supporters were justifiably angry when Hillary Clinton, using the broadest of brushes, called her opponents “deplorables” during the 2016 campaign. But neo-Nazis and Klan sympathizers unquestionably are deplorable, and anyone who thinks otherwise—who sees nothing wrong with marching past a synagogue shouting “Sieg Heil!” surely must be deplorable themselves. This isn’t a right vs. left matter, it’s a right vs. wrong one, and anyone with any sense of decency knows this.

And yet Trump chose to draw a moral equivalency between the deplorables and those protesting them, claiming there were “some very fine people on both sides,” and that “Not all of those people were neo-Nazis, believe me. Not all of those people were white supremacists by any stretch.”

And so given an opportunity to take the high road, to show his critics wrong, that he does indeed possess moral fiber and a sense of right and wrong, the president allowed his basic instincts—crude, narrow-minded and tinged with bigotry—to surface. No, Donald Trump doesn’t wave a swastika or shout “Blood and Soil!” like the Charlottesville goons did. He just says there are “very fine people” among those who do. These were his words. He spoke them. And then he gets upset when people suggest he’s a racist? What are people supposed to think when the president of the United States equivocates on people shouting “Sieg Heil” and waving swastikas? Again: deplorable.

Trump’s defenders ask how can he possibly be racist? Aren’t unemployment rates for blacks, Hispanics and woman down on his watch? They are indeed. For example, the jobless rate for blacks (age 16+) was 7.8% when Trump was sworn in, but 6.6% last month (though that’s up from 5.9% in May). But the big picture: it’s also down from 16.8% in March 2010.

The rate’s been falling for nearly a decade, it doesn’t prove or disprove anything, other than that the resilient labor market for blacks has been improving for a long time, and that Trump inherited a positive trend. He has helped the economy by cutting taxes and regulations—and deserves credit for doing so—but from a racial standpoint, what does this prove or disprove? This is why we keep coming back to his words, his equivocating on the thugs we saw in the streets of Thomas Jefferson’s Charlottesville a year ago.

It’s not just the Charlottesville comments.

In 1973, when Trump, then 27, was serving as the president of his family’s real estate company, the Justice Department sued the company for alleged racial discrimination against black people looking to rent apartments. Trump settled the case, only to be charged with the very same thing a few years later. When five black teenagers were arrested and convicted of raping a white woman in Central Park in 1989, Trump took out full-page newspaper ads calling for them to be executed. After spending years in prison, all five suspects were acquitted on DNA evidence, yet in 2013, Trump still implied they were guilty.

The Atlantic City casinos he used to own (and ran into the ground) were fined for mistreatment of black employees.

Fast-forward to the present, Trump refused to condemn white supremacists who campaigned for him in 2016. He attacked the Muslim mother and father of U.S. Army Captain Human Khan, who was killed in Iraq in 2004. He claimed the federal judge ruling in the Trump University fraud case (Trump had to pay $25 million to settle it) was biased because “he’s a Mexican” (for the record, Judge Gonzalo Curiel was born in Indiana, and as a prosecutor two decades ago went after Mexican drug cartels, earring a death threat from one if them in the process). And who can forget those heartbreaking images of innocent children in cages along the Mexican border?

The big picture is this: Like the base that put him in the White House, I think Trump fears an America with a face that isn’t white. That base—generally older, whiter, more rural and less educated—is panicking because demographics are a losing battle for them, and they know it. Whites are already majority-minority (less than 50% of the population) in several states, including California and Texas (Trump only won 52% of its vote in 2016), and Census projections say the nation as a whole will cross that threshold by 2045. Helping to fuel this trend: White women are marrying later and having fewer babies. With five kids by three wives, Trump’s doing his part to reverse the trend, but this is one problem he can’t fix.