willingness to pursue policies that disadvantage nonwhites, and a refusal to jeopardize the party’s support among racists. Donald Trump has pulled the cloak away, leaving the party’s alliance with racism exposed for all to see.

Donald Trump’s first appearance in the New York Times, in 1973, came as a result of a lawsuit by the Department of Justice over his refusal to rent to African-Americans. In 1989, he took out a full-page ad in the New York Daily News to demand the death penalty for five African-Americans for a rape in Central Park. (They turned out to be innocent.) He has been credibly accused by former associates of racist statements and practices behind closed doors. As a presidential candidate, he has focused more of his attention on Latinos andMuslims, but the discriminatory quality of his persona has, if anything, grown even more naked. He declared that Judge Gonzalo Curiel is unfit to preside over the most recent of his many lawsuits, this one concerning fraudulent practices at “Trump University,” because Curiel is “Mexican,” which is Trump’s way of saying Curiel descends from immigrants from Mexico. He also proposed “a total and complete shutdown of Muslims entering the United States,” and then later blamed the rampage in Orlando on the entire Muslim American community, who (he claimed) refused to cooperate with authorities against terrorism.

These statements were not incidental gaffes. They were the foundation of Trump’s appeal. As the political scientist Michael Tesler shows, previous Republican primaries lacked overtly racial themes, and as a result, voters did not