As revealing and embarrassing as Trump’s enduring popularity with Republican voters is—as easy as it is to imagine them as a kind of unbreakable dam—I trust Trump to know where he’s vulnerable better than I trust my own cynicism about self-identified Republican voters. Those voters have cheered or tolerated all of Trump’s racism. But that is racism as it should defined. As I noted last week, millions of Americans believe racism only describes people who use forbidden slurs in casual conversation. Hearing Trump do that would, as a matter of almost mathematical certainty, be a turning point for some of them, and Trump can’t really afford to lose even a small sliver of his remaining support.
