Reprinted with permission from Shareblue.com

Trump showed his racist colors when he kicked off his campaign by calling Mexican immigrants “rapists,” and now he wants to remind America that he is still exactly that racist.

On Thursday afternoon, he traveled to West Virginia for what was billed as a “Roundtable Discussion on Tax Reform,” but turned into a nasty political rally that reached rock bottom rather quickly.

During an extended riff about his current immigration freakout, he explicitly referenced his disgusting campaign kickoff speech.

“Remember my opening remarks at Trump Tower?” he said. “I used the word ‘rape.’ And yesterday it came out where, this journey coming up, women are raped at levels that nobody’s ever seen before.”

Trump has been on a particularly racist tear since this past weekend, when he began tweeting about a group of human rights protesters who were marching through Mexico. He accused them of trying to “take advantage” of DACA — a program that protected young immigrants from deportation, which he rescinded last fall and for which the marchers would not have been eligible anyway.

That Fox News-fueled rampage culminated in the announcement that Trump would be sending troops to our border with Mexico, despite historically low border apprehensions.

Trump’s overtly racist rhetoric about immigrants backfired on him in court recently, giving one federal judge a reason to allow a lawsuit trying to preserve DACA to proceed.

“One might reasonably infer that a candidate who makes overtly bigoted statements on the campaign trail might be more likely to engage in similarly bigoted action in office,” U.S. District Judge Nicholas G. Garaufis wrote.

That Trump — now in office — has doubled down on one of his most racist statements ever won’t likely help his cause in court. But it might succeed in its true purpose of appeasing Trump’s resentful base voters, even as the majority of the country continues to be disgusted by him.