IN FAIRNESS, HE DOESN'T JUST BACK RACISTS...:

President Trump on Monday inserted himself into a searing racial debate here in the cradle of the Confederacy, barnstorming Mississippi on the eve of a Senate runoff election riven by divergent attitudes here about the legacy of segregation and lynching.

With his forceful and unambiguous endorsement of Republican Sen. Cindy Hyde-Smith -- whose embrace of Confederate traditions and comments about a "public hanging" have revived painful memories of Mississippi's dark history -- the president again dived into a cultural firestorm.

By yoking himself with Hyde-Smith, Trump is backing a politician who said she would sit with a supporter in the front row of a public hanging, donned a Confederate uniform to promote tourism at Jefferson Davis's homestead, and graduated from one all-white segregation academy while sending her daughter to another.

"Race is always the key in which life in Mississippi is played," said Stuart Stevens, a Republican strategist and Mississippi native who wrote a book about growing up here. "It's just always present and it is the greatest determinant, still, in Mississippi of one's path through life."

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