'Trump is a racist. Say that out loud': NYT's Charles Blow drops the mic after a weekend of presidential bigotry

Following a weekend in which Donald Trump first attacked Rep. Elijah Cummings (D-MD) on Twitter -- and followed it with no less than 13 more tweets mentioning the lawmaker -- New York Times columnist Charles Blow said it is time that everyone acknowledges that Donald Trump is a full-blown racist and proceed from there.

In a column entitled "The Rot You Smell Is a Racist Potus," Blow got right to his point.

"It seems maddeningly repetitive to have to return time and again to the fact that Donald Trump is a racist, but it must be done," he wrote. "It must be done because it is a foundational character issue, one that supersedes and informs many others, in much the same way that his sexism and xenophobia does."

Noting the most recent tweets, as well as previous ones attacking Rep. John Lewis (D-GA), where the president links only lawmakers of color to crime in the communities they represent, Blow said there is a method to Trump's rants.

"None of this is about crime as a discrete phenomenon, but rather about inextricably linking criminality to blackness. White supremacy isn’t necessarily about rendering white people as superhuman; it is just as often about rendering nonwhite people as subhuman. Either way the hierarchy is established, with whiteness assuming the superior position," he explained. "A survey of Trump’s tweets reveals that his attachment of criminality to populations is almost exclusively to black and brown people and to 'inner cities,' an urban euphemism for black and brown neighborhoods."

Pointing to a quote from Martin Luther King who said, “In the final analysis, racism is evil because its ultimate logic is genocide,” Blow wrote, "The mouth that demeans may not always be attached to the hand that destroys, but they are most assuredly connected in spirit and in spite."

As for Trump himself, Blow suggests that the president's racism is so deeply ingrained, he may have no idea how racist he is.

"The core of this man is racist in a way that is so fused to his sense of the world that he is incapable of seeing it as racist. It is instinctual for him to attack people of color. It is instinctual for him to denigrate the places they live and the countries to which they trace their heritage," he elaborated. "He has so bought into the white supremacist narrative that his ideology no longer requires, in his own thinking, a label. For him, this lie of it is just the truth of it, and what is 'right' can’t be racist."

He then issued a verdict.

"Trump is a racist. Say that out loud," he stated. "Say it with the profundity that it deserves. That to me is the beginning and the ending of the rationale I need to stand steadfast in my resistance."

You can read the whole piece here.