“With ‘kung flu,’ ‘thugs,’ and ‘our heritage,’ Trump leans on racial grievance as he reaches for a campaign reset”

So reads the headline of a Washington Post analysis of the president’s self-defeating rally in Tulsa yesterday. While it’s great that the Post has zeroed in on the truckloads of racism Donald Trump wove into his speech, the idea communicated in the headline that the president “leans on racial grievance” is baffling and misleading. The president did far more than “lean”; when the president slurs Asians, attacks African-Americans, implies that Mexicans are sex criminals, and describes taking down monuments to the Confederacy as attacking “our” heritage, he is actively asserting a white supremacist and white nationalist vision of America, all the more so when he is not just a candidate but the actual president of the United States of America. And when the Post notes that Trump intends to “build on the darker themes of a previous campaign notable for its attacks on Hispanic immigrants and Muslims,” “darker themes” only obscures what these actual themes are: overt white nationalism and white supremacism. Presenting this president’s statements as unrelated fragments rather than as parts of a coherent world view that can be named does a disservice to the newspaper’s readers.