If Republican operatives had anything at all on Hillary Clinton, you can be absolutely certain that she would be in jail by now.

It's possible that Donald Trump is not himself a racist, but so what?  He panders to the widespread racism, latent and overt, in America to motivate what he hopes is a majority of voting citizens to elect him president. This isn't new, Republicans have used veiled racism to win elections starting at least with Ronald Reagan; but what Trump has done is to take off the veil, go from covert to overt, something that is alarming to mainstream Republicans who want to hang on to their plausible deniability.  Now all the Republicans have left to use against Clinton is their mud-slinging, which hasn't in itself ever been quite enough.

We'll see how well Trump's "political incorrectness" works out for him.