The New Yorker’s Susan Glasser says racism will be the theme of Trump’s re-election campaign. He plays it like a fiddle.

On Tuesday, President Trump convened his Cabinet in the White House. First to speak after a long, rambling, and inaccuracy-filled monologue by Trump himself was Ben Carson, the Secretary of Housing and Urban Development. In a Cabinet where flowery praise of the President has become standard, Carson outdid himself. A celebrated brain surgeon whose odd asides had been one of the minor subplots of the 2016 Republican Presidential primaries, Carson has largely existed on the margins of the Trump show since joining the Administration, except for one brief scandal in which his spending of more than thirty thousand dollars on office furniture was revealed. He had an important role to play this week, however.

Carson is the lone African-American in Trump’s Cabinet, and Tuesday’s meeting took place forty-eight hours into a furor over the President’s Sunday-morning tweets attacking four left-wing Democratic members of Congress, all of them women of color. The Squad, as they are collectively known, should “go back” to the countries they came from, Trump tweeted, although three of the four are U.S.-born and all, of course, are American. The tweets were instantly condemned as racist, but the President, unrepentant, seemed to want to keep the fight going. First, Carson was sent to Fox News to provide cover for Trump. “I have an advantage of knowing the President very well, and he’s not a racist, and his comments are not racist,” Carson told viewers. At the Cabinet meeting, Carson offered more validation for the President. Here was his contribution to the national dialogue, as recorded by the White House’s own transcript:

secretary carson: Thank you, Mr. President. And just before I talk a little bit about what’s going on at hud, I just want to thank you for your incredible courage—

the president: Thank you.

secretary carson: —and stamina and resilience with unwithering criticism, unfair criticism, all the time. And I would just, sort of, sum it up by saying: Would you rather have a non-politician whose speech is unfiltered, who gets a lot of stuff done? Or somebody with a silver tongue who gets nothing done?

the president: But I thought I had a silver tongue. [Laughter.] I heard that so often. I always thought I had a silver tongue. [Laughter.] But I agree with you.

secretary carson: But, you know, as I told you before, I think God is using you.

Carson’s shameless sucking up to Trump, an act of self-abasement on live television, was hard to watch. But it wasn’t treated as news. Few accounts even remarked on it. His brief appearance as Trump’s human shield did nothing to halt the accusations that the President is an unreconstructed racist. Trump himself essentially ignored Carson’s defense, not only not retreating from his tweets about the four freshman Democratic congresswomen but going to a campaign rally in North Carolina, on Wednesday night, where he launched an extensive, pre-planned attack on them. One by one, he read their names from his teleprompter, stopping when he got to that of Representative Ilhan Omar, an immigrant from Somalia, and listening with apparent approval as thousands of red-shirted maga fans chanted, “Send her back! Send her back!”

The racism, it turns out, wasn’t a mistake, a slip of Trump’s otherwise silver tongue, as Carson would have it. It was a calculated political play, and the news of the last few days was that Trump had revealed it so clearly: this is how intends to run for reëlection, in 2020.

Say this for the racists of old, like George Wallace and Senators Eastland and Theodore Bilbo: They didn’t pretend that they were not racists.