It started with Donald Trump's racist tweets demanding that four Democratic congresswomen Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, Rashida Tlaib, Ayanna Pressley and Ilhan Omar "go back" to the "crime-infested places from which they came."
The RNC is intentionally and mendaciously fueling the same racism Trump is fueling, for the same purpose: whipping up the base.
Who is funding this horse manure? Much of the money that's flowing into Republican coffers is coming from the same place it's always come from: Wall Street.
Last year, JP Morgan contributed $149,908 to the RNC.
JP Morgan's chairman and chief executive, Jamie Dimon, is no racist. A few months ago, in a speech to the Economic Club of Chicago, he said white people don't adequately understand racial discrimination.
"If you're white," he said, "paint yourself black and walk down the street one day, and you'll probably have a little more empathy for how some of these folks get treated. We need to make a special effort because this is a special problem."
Since Trump's inauguration, JP Morgan's stock is up nearly a third. Dimon earned $31m in 2018.
Asked recently how Trump was doing, Dimon gushed, "Regulatory stuff, good."
The summit with North Korea's Kim Jong-un? A "great idea."He also complimented the administration's "negotiating tactic" on China and called the relationship between big business and the White House "active and good."
Asked about Trump saying the Fed had "gone crazy," Dimon said he had "never seen a president who wanted interest rates to go up."
Wall Street and the CEOs of major corporations have made a hellish deal -- ignore Trump's repugnance and provide ongoing support for the GOP regardless of its complicity in return for high returns. Perhaps they also believe that the flames of racism and xenophobia will distract the nation sufficiently for them to continue looting it.
Robert Reich, former U.S. Secretary of Labor and Professor of Public Policy at the University of California at Berkeley, has a new film, "Inequality for All," to be released September 27. He blogs at www.robertreich.org.