(CNN) President Donald Trump, amid a racially charged fight with African-American Rep. Elijah Cummings, D-Maryland, had a message for America on Tuesday morning outside the White House.

"I am the least racist person there is anywhere in the world," Trump said. "What I've done for African-Americans in two and a half years, no president has been able to do anything like it."

Which, well, wow.

The claim is, obviously, ridiculous. To state the obvious, there is no known measure that would allow us to quantify how racist or not a person is. And if that measure did exist, Donald Trump would not be the least racist person in the world -- or anything close to it.

From his early days as a businessman in which he and his father were charged with racial housing discrimination by the Justice Department (the case was eventually settled), to his 2016 campaign in which he aggressively trafficked in racial animus and stereotypes, to his presidency, which has been marked by his comments that both sides were to blame for the white supremacist violence in Charlottesville, Virginia, Trump's entire life has been a case study in racial dog whistles and worse.

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