You could find articles like these, which made the case that Obama was wrong to weigh in, that he was “racializing” the case, and that he was making tensions worse not better, in literally every conservative publication in the country—and a rant on every single Fox News program.

But over just the past week, Trump has engaged in far, FAR more grotesque and overtly bigoted “racializing” of issues that are “ordinarily beneath the notice of the leader of the free world” than anything Obama ever did. And it’s part of a tired pattern from Charlottesville to “send them back” to “looting not shooting.” In fact, Trump has done this so often that sometimes his race-baiting tweets go by without even meriting a media mention.

And yet the response from the right is explaining it away as Trump being a doofus, or laments about how the Republican party could possibly be seen as a vehicle for racism, or what someone once called strategic silence.

So once again Trump’s actions have been clarifying. He’s revealed that criticisms of Obama for trying to mediate a parochial racial profiling case weren’t good-faith attempts to police how a president should use their platform to help ease racial tensions.