Donald Trump’s meteoric rise from con artist to commander was fueled by his racist lie that President Obama was a foreigner. Now he thinks that since the slur worked once, he should hurl it at another person of color.

Hence his riff yesterday about Kamala Harris: “I just heard it today that she doesn’t meet the requirements (to be veep). I have no idea if that’s right. I would have assumed the Democrats would have checked that out before she gets chosen to run for vice-president. But that’s a very serious…I just heard about it, I’ll take a look.”

Sure, pal, go take a look. What you’ll find – assuming that your staff can put the 14th Amendment into a coloring book with crayons – is that anyone born on American soil is an American. Period. Harris was born on a patch of American soil called California.

By now we’re painfully familiar with Trump’s rhetorical shell game. He says that he “heard” that Harris – the daughter of Jamaican and Indian immigrants – might not be a real American. He “heard” it from a Newsweek article written by “a very highly qualified” lawyer; in truth, Newsweek is an empty shell of a website, and the “highly qualified” lawyer is a right-wing crank who once clerked for Clarence Thomas and apparently can’t read the 14th Amendment.

But we can read: “All persons born or naturalized in the United States, and subject to the jurisdiction thereof, are citizens of the United States and of the state wherein they reside.” So said its authors, in 1868.

Nevertheless, Trump is happy to question whether Harris is really an American – even though “I have no idea if that’s right.” Yeah, he has “no idea” whether the slur is accurate, but he’ll spread the fake news anyway.

It’s tempting to suggest that Trump is playing this game only because he’s so desperate – the newest national poll shows him trailing Biden and Harris by 11 points – but we know darn well that racist demagoguery is simply baked into his DNA. He’d slur a Black-Asian woman, a child of immigrants, even if he were 11 points up, because she doesn’t meet his definition of the American dream. (Although, if he were 11 points up, he wouldn’t be pulling up mailboxes and screwing the U.S. Postal Service.)

Actually, when I heard his birther remarks yesterday, I immediately time-traveled back to Trump’s old tweets. Talk about deja vu!

On Aug. 6, 2012, the game show host wrote: “An ‘extremely credible source’ has called my office and told me that Barack Obama’s birth certificate is a fraud.” (We’re still waiting for that extremely credible source to deliver the goods.) On Aug. 27, 2012, he urged all Republicans to push the birther lie: “Take the offensive!” On Sept. 10, 2013, he tweeted that Obama’s birth certificate is “a computer generated forgery.” Fourteen months later, still at it, he tweeted that the certificate was “fabricated.” (In the fall of 2016, he publicly conceded that Obama was American-born, that he had lied all along, but a sufficient share of saps still voted for him.)

So the big question now is whether he can work this con a second time, despite all the health and economic havoc he is wreaking. Four years ago, when candidate Trump was going full birther, Hillary Clinton plaintively asked, “When will we stop this ugliness, this bigotry?”

You tell me.