This is just stunning. For those who don’t remember it, when SC Governor first ran for governor the good ol’ boys were up in arms. She was hit with all manner of scurrilous allegations but perhaps none were so notable as when South Carolina State Senator Jake Knotts got his Boss Hogg on:

Transcript:

In the next three days find out crime that her daddy wears a turban around Lexington, and her mama wears a ruby between her head, and she is a sheikh and trying to be a Methodist. And it gets to Greenville, around the Bob Jones University people, they not gonna like that. And with Pat Robertson sending out that email today, people need to look at that. We got a raghead in Washington, we don’t need a raghead in the State House.

Now, Knotts has crawled out of the cesspit and endorsed Donald Trump.

Before Donald Trump declared war on political correctness, a state senator named Jake Knotts was blazing that trail in South Carolina.

On Wednesday, the two Republicans whose inflammatory rhetoric has been considered poison pills by the GOP establishment, will appear together at a Trump rally in Lexington, S.C. Knotts said he will formally endorse Trump’s presidential candidacy and is organizing what he called “a good, old-fashioned, chicken bog” barbecue to support him.

Knotts’s commentary has been so incendiary over the years it has drawn gasps from South Carolina’s clubby political elite. In a 2010 episode, Knotts called both President Obama and the state’s Indian-American governor, Nikki Haley, “a raghead,” making national headlines and prompting a formal vote of censure from the Lexington County Republican Party.

One of the raps that has been hung on Trump is that he is too cozy by half with racists and white supremacists. What at first seemed like a rookie politician too eager to accept any and all plaudits directed his way now is not as clear. Last weekend I posted on Trump approvingly retweeting a Tweet from a Twitter user named “@WhiteGenocideTM”. A small bit of due diligence would have found that this Twitter user had tweeted an image of Bernie Sanders in a gas chamber. That was by no means the most racist or anti-Semitic tweet sent by that user.

With respect to Knotts, it’s not as if his racist tirade against Nikki Haley was an obscure event. It was national news for several days and completely dominated Twitter (where Trump apparently spends every waking moment) as well. Knotts’ rant was so widely publicized and embarrassing that he ended up losing his seat in 2012 to a write in candidate. If you google “Jake Knotts” the first several dozen articles are about him calling Nikki Haley (and Obama) “ragheads.” So Trump cannot claim that he is somehow unaware of Knotts’ history; if he is, he is the worst person at conducting due diligence in history.

While one can write off the whole Twitter-verse as being something like a putrescent corpse, accepting the face-to-face endorsement of a man who made what can only be termed a particularly vile and racist tirade is quite another. Trump has been riding on the benefit of a doubt. The next move is up to him.