This reaction reveals something important: When liberal journalists say something is racist or white supremacist, they don’t use the words the way normal people use them. We see now that they detach concepts of whiteness, blackness, etc., from skin color, family, or ancestry and attach it instead to ideology and party.

You’re white if you’re a Hispanic who votes Republican. You’re white supremacist if you’re a black voter who votes Republican. This shows us that racist and white supremacist, coming from these quarters, might just mean Republican or conservative.

What’s more, we learn something about how minority voters see politics and politicians in contrast to how media elites do.

Trump’s most famous offenses on the score of racism include his denigrating Gonzalo Curiel, a Mexican American (Indiana-born) federal judge, as hopelessly biased against Trump. Trump said, “We are building a wall. He’s a Mexican. We’re building a wall between here and Mexico.” That’s juvenile reasoning from Trump grounded in zero evidence. Ironically, it’s the same sort of racial determinism that much of the media engages in: Because Trump’s policy goal is seen as an offense against Mexicans who want to come here, the press assumed that Americans of Mexican descent and legal immigrants would automatically hate Trump.