Race baiting has been long been a part of the political playbook for Democrats who seem obsessed on using it to defame President Donald Trump leading into the 2020 elections.

This summer, the racism card is being played like never before.

The president set off a firestorm on the left by tweeting that the four Democratic congresswomen of color — Reps. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, Ayanna Pressley, Rashida Tlaib and Ilhan Omar — should “go back” to their native countries and then bring back ideas that can help American communities.

After Rep. Omar tweeted that America needed to “accept that this racist president wants every black/brown person deported and Muslims banned,” Trump countered that he does not believe that “the four Congresswomen are capable of loving our country.”

Next came Trump’s verbal battle with Rep. Elijah Cummings. Liberals were in a frenzy when the president called Cummings’ Baltimore district “a disgusting, rat and rodent-infested mess” that’s far worse and more dangerous than the poor conditions we see on our southern border.

Few media outlets played the Cummings interview of 1999 in which he used the same words as Trump — “drug-infested” — to describe his home district.

“A lot of the drugs we’re talking about today have already taken the lives of so many children — the same children that I watched 14 or 15 years ago as they grew up, now walking around like zombies,” Cummings said.

Twenty years later his Baltimore district is still depressed.

To counter the latest onslaught of racism charges by Democrats, President Trump invited 20 African-American faith leaders to meet with him at the White House.

We didn’t hear a lot about that meeting from media outlets, although it included two respected conservatives in the African-American community — Ben Carson, the current Secretary of Housing and Urban Development, and Dr. Alveda King, the niece of Martin Luther King Jr.

King said the meeting with the president was not a photo-op, but that it was sincere and productive.

In an interview afterward, she said the president is not a racist, evidenced by the economic/social programs and the criminal justice reforms he’s pushed which directly benefit African-Americans.

As for the Baltimore comment, King said the president has raised an issue of how people, families are suffering in Cummings’ own district and how it needs to be fixed.

At a press conference in Baltimore, Carson said the federal government has invested a lot of money in the city and will continue to do so but that there are problems that can’t be swept under the rug. That comment points to the decadeslong misuse of federal funds under the city’s inept Democratic leadership.

Carson said he’s never seen anything that even resembles racism with Trump and that the president’s policies have helped black and Hispanic unemployment levels reach an all-time low.

The president, he said, has engaged and done things for minorities that others had talked about but never followed through on doing.

Trump also got into a Twitter war with the Rev. Al Sharpton, who is exalted by liberals as a civil rights champion in our generation. In reality, Sharpton’s history on the racism front smacks of hypocrisy.

Why would leading Democratic candidates like Joe Biden, Kamala Harris, Elizabeth Warren and Kirsten Gillibrand fall over each other in trying to win the favor of an Al Sharpton, while dissing people of strong character like Dr. Carson and Dr. King, who have actually brought results to the African-American community?

While liberals use the racism card and mock Trump as the “racist in chief,” voters can look at the records to see who really has their interests in mind.

By Jim Zbick | tneditor@tnonline.com