Second, just because Trump may believe that racial dog-whistling is helpful to him doesn’t mean the rest of us should. We’ve learned from Tim Alberta’s just-published book American Carnage that Trump wants to believe the release of the “Access Hollywood” tape four weeks before the 2016 election actually helped him, but his unwillingness to reckon with his own disastrous behavior shouldn’t gull the rest of us.

As for racially or ethnically noxious talk, the two key moments in his four-year-long political life before this in which he made naked racial appeals—the assault on the judge hearing a case unfavorable to his prospects for being a Mexican and the “good people on both sides” remark after the Charlotteville march-riot—were terrible for him. In the latter case, he fell to the low 30s in the polls.

If Trump wanted to call out the anti-Americanism of the Squad, there are about a hundred more effective ways to do so than to say “go back where you came from”—one of the lowest forms of pre-Internet trolling, not even suitable for an idiot caller to a radio talk show hosted by a raging lunatic like Bob Grant.