What did Donald Trump do today?

He said that undocumented immigrants were "naturally" bred to do farm labor.

To hear Trump tell it, there is plenty of labor available to harvest crops on American farms, because he has implemented an elaborate process by which undocumented workers are arrested, detained, deported, somehow given "schooling and learning," and then brought back into the United States as guest workers. 

No such process exists, although Trump has been claiming that it already does. It's not clear whether he understands that this isn't true.

In reality, thanks to ICE crackdowns that specifically targeted agricultural workers, combined with the sudden domestic oversupply thanks to other countries' retaliatory tariffs, crops are rotting in the fields for lack of harvesters even as prices are crashing through the floor. The result is a spiraling debt crisis for American farms that rivals the one from Trump's first term, which required a massive taxpayer bailout.

Trump addressed the subject again today in an interview on CNBC, and he had this to say about the largely Latino population of farmworkers that he is simultaneously trying to drive out of the country and anxious to have work:

TRUMP: We can't let our [farm owners] not have anybody, uhh — you know, these are very, uhh — these people, they're, they're — you can't replace them very easily. You know, people that live in the inner city are not doing that work, they're just not doing that work. And They've tried, we've tried, everybody tried. Uh, They don't do it. These people do it naturally. Naturally. I said what happens if they get into — a farmer, the other day, what happens if they get a bad back. He said, "They don't get a bad back, sir, because if they get a bad back, they die." I said, "that's interesting, isn't it?"

Trump has never really tried to hide his belief that people are "naturally" suited to one kind of life or another based on their race: Jews as "Shylocks" and accountants, Latinos as farm workers and hotel housekeepers and rapists, and so on. 

 As journalist Ashton Pittman and others noted, this is exactly the same kind of racist taxonomy that was used to justify enslaving Africans and their Black American descendants: the idea that the whole race had been built specifically to bear up under brutal labor:

Trump is right about one thing, though: farm labor is physically demanding, dangerous, and brutally hard on bodies of any race. Undocumented workers contribute tens of billions of dollars to Social Security and Medicare every year in the form of payroll taxes, but cannot receive any benefits from them.

Why does this matter?

• Even by Trump standards, this is some racist shit. 

• A U.S. President who sounds exactly like a Confederate Presidency is unfit for office in the 21st century.