Washington Post: “Throughout his public life, Trump has pitted one group of Americans against another and inserted himself in racial controversies… As he leads his party into the potentially perilous midterm election five months from now, Trump is trying to make cultural identity a central theme of the Republican pitch to voters. His messages have been amplified by his surrogates as well as by friendly broadcasters on Fox News Channel and elsewhere in the conservative media.”

“Trump is calculating that by playing to people’s fears and anxieties he can maximize turnout among hard-core supporters to counterbalance evident enthusiasm on the Democratic side. Fueling Trump’s approach, advisers say, is an unremitting fear of his own: that his base could abandon him if he is deemed too weak on immigration, which was a centerpiece of his 2016 campaign.”

A GoFundMe campaign is raising money to send a Mariachi band and taco truck to the offices of the New York City lawyer who threatened to call immigration authorities on Spanish-speaking restaurant employees.

Alan Abramowitz: “Data from the Pew Research Center show that six months into Donald Trump’s presidency, the gap between whites with and without college degrees in opinions of the president was enormous. Non-college whites were far more likely to approve of Trump’s performance than white college graduates.”

“This gap appears to have little or nothing to do with differences between the economic circumstances of these two groups. While whites without college degrees did experience far more economic distress than those with college degrees, economic distress itself appeared to have little relationship with opinions of Trump.”

“The main explanation for the class divide in opinions of Trump among whites appeared to be differing views on race relations. White college graduates were much more likely than whites without college degrees to hold liberal views on the significance of racial discrimination, and opinions on the significance of racial discrimination were strongly related to opinions of Trump’s performance. Racial attitudes, not economics, appears to be the main factor producing strong support for Trump among members of the white working class.”

“The Anti-Defamation League is reporting a 57 percent increase in anti-Semitic incidents in the U.S. last year, the highest tally that the Jewish civil rights group has counted in more than two decades,” the AP reports.

“Nikolas Cruz, the alleged gunman who killed 17 people at a Florida high school on Wednesday, trained with a white-supremacist group,” its leader told the Daily Beast.

Said Jordan Jereb, captain of the Republic of Florida: “He probably used that training to do what he did yesterday. Nobody I know told him to do that, he just freaked out.”