It's typically I didn't call a black man a nigger so I couldn't possibly be racist. The simplest, most basic form of racism. Ignoring everything else.
Basically this is what racism has come to mean to a majority of white Americans in the 21st century: the smallest act to warrant labeling someone a racist is the above, and anything more has to be on the order of advocating for literal Jim Crow segregation, literal slavery, literal lynching, literal KKK. Nothing that's "similar to" or "resembles", no, the literal things themselves.
You see this in how people react to racist statements made. When someone is guilty of calling someone the above, the backtrack isn't defending the slur or statement as not-racist. Instead, people say "that's not who I am", "heat of moment", "a mistake", or "that's not what I said." This reaction is an admission that calling someone the above is an inarguable racist act.
For anything short of this slur, for example the border situation or calling migrants an "invasion" or "black inner cities are dangerous infested war zones", the argument is that it's not racist. It's a wildly different reaction because there's no admission of racism in the first place.
For a majority of white Americans, nothing short of this will mean the President has done anything racist. Even if he used the slur, there would be a rush to defend, but it wouldn't be to defend the act, but to the President as having made a mistake.
