Donald Trump’s monthslong crusade against Democratic Senate hopeful Abdul El-Sayed has been ugly in indefensible ways, but at a Friday night rally in Florida, the president pursued a new line of attack against the Michigan Democrat.

In a message delivered to Black voters whom Trump sees as supporters, the Republican said of El-Sayed, “I hope you’re going to vote against him and send him back to where he came from.”

For many years, “go back to where you came from” was the kind of bigoted cliché one might expect to hear from the angry drunk at the end of the bar. In recent years, however, the overt racism has been embraced publicly by the sitting president of the United States.

But the problem isn’t simply the jingoistic nativism. It’s also the fact that El-Sayed isn’t an immigrant. The Democratic Senate candidate was born in Rochester Hills, Michigan.

No one can send El-Sayed “back to where he came from,” because he already lives in Michigan — which is where he came from.

What’s more, if this sounds at all familiar, it’s not your imagination. Six years ago, four progressive Democratic congresswomen — Reps. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez of New York, Ilhan Omar of Minnesota, Ayanna Pressley of Massachusetts and Rashida Tlaib of Michigan — voted against a border bill that they deemed too conservative, despite support from Democratic leaders.

Soon after, in an act of performative racism, Trump used his social platform to call on the four progressive lawmakers to “go back” to the “totally broken and crime infested places from which they came.” The president added that the congresswomen “originally came from countries whose governments are a complete and total catastrophe, the worst, most corrupt and inept anywhere in the world (if they even have a functioning government at all).”

Whether or not the Republican understood this, three of the four lawmakers he targeted (Ocasio-Cortez, Pressley and Tlaib) were born in the United States.

The racial dimension to this is unmistakable. Trump rails against his white political opponents in vicious ways on a nearly daily basis, but he’s never once suggested that Joe Biden, Hillary Clinton, Jack Smith or James Comey should “go back” to where they came from.

But when lashing out at officials and candidates who aren’t white, the incumbent president has demonstrated a knack for peddling a perverse assumption: His foes might be native-born Americans, but he nevertheless sees them as immigrants deserving of his contempt.

Obviously, even if all of Trump’s targets were naturalized American citizens, they still wouldn’t deserve to be subjected to this kind of racist garbage. But the more he uses this messaging against those who aren’t immigrants, the more his twisted vision of what it means to be an American comes into focus.

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