Trump has done this before, suggesting United States District Court Judge Gonzalo Curiel, who had ruled against him, could not be fair because he was Mexican. Judge Curiel is a Hoosier, born in Indiana.
The use of a racist trope by the current occupant of the Oval Office is stunning in its raw appeal to racism. We are reminded that President Ronald Wilson Reagan would not take off his suit jacket in the Oval Office out of respect for the institution and the men who had previously worked there. The Oval Office and the bully pulpit of the presidency has now been turned into a corner of the dark web, where conspiracy theories about Jews, Muslims, and people of color are traded and racists advocate violence based on how a person looks or how their name is spelled.
Have you ever wondered what Germans of good character felt as they watched their nation descend into madness in the 1930's?
Now you know.
Someday, sooner rather than later, we shall return to sanity and to a time when thoughtful people of exceptional character, intellect, and ability occupy the highest office in the land. A time when, faced with a nation being ripped in half, a man said this:
I am loath to close. We are not enemies, but friends. We must not be enemies. Though passion may have strained it must not break our bonds of affection. The mystic chords of memory, stretching from every battlefield and patriot grave to every living heart and hearthstone all over this broad land, will yet swell the chorus of the Union, when again touched, as surely they will be, by the better angels of our nature.
Abraham Lincoln, 16th President of the United States, First Inaugural Address, Monday March 4, 1861.