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Trump Tirade On ‘Racist’ DAs Echoes Other Racist Tropes


Looking out at a sea of faces at a Texas fairground, most of them white, former President Donald Trump seethed about his legal troubles and blamed them on malicious prosecutors.

“These prosecutors are vicious, horrible people. They’re racists and they’re very sick, they’re mentally sick,” Trump said, before warning his audience: “In reality, they’re not after me. They’re after you.”

He repeated his charge of racism, but skipped over an obvious detail: Those prosecutors are Black.

His diatribe left the clear impression that Trump, who rode the politics of white grievance into the White House, thinks he can’t possibly be treated fairly by Black officials.

The comments carry the echoes of racist messages that have proliferated in recent years –- that Black people and other minorities are taking power, and that they will exact revenge on white people, or at the very least treat white people as they have been treated.

That’s among the fears stoking the white supremacy movement, the so-called “white replacement theory” that people of color will supplant whites in the country’s power dynamics and social structure.

“These are the same justifications that they use for Jim Crow laws and their mistreatment of African Americans. So this is just a rerun of what we’ve seen in our country,” said one Black district attorney, Brian Middleton of Fort Bend County, Texas, which lies southwest of central Houston.

Trump attacking prosecutors is nothing new. When his business and political dealings are investigated, he often strikes back with accusations of misconduct and witch hunts.

The former president has long been accused of biogtry. Before the 2016 election, Trump called U.S. District Judge Gonzalo Curiel a “hater” who could not be fair to him in a fraud case involving Trump University because of the judge’s Hispanic heritage and because Trump vowed to build a wall between the U.S. and Mexico.

And after 2017 demonstrations by white supremacists in Charlottesville, Virginia, turned violent, he said at a news conference that there were “very fine people, on both sides.”

He had never accused his prosecutors of racism before — but then, until the start of the year, one of those attorneys was Cyrus Vance Jr., who is white.

Now he faces an array of Black prosecutors: New York Attorney General Letitia James; Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg, Vance’s successor and the first Black person to hold that office; Fani Willis, the Fulton County, Georgia, DA; even Rep. Bennie Thompson, the leader of the congressional investigation into the Jan. 6 insurrection. And critics say Trump’s rhetoric has escalated, perhaps because he recognizes that some among his base are receptive to more overt racism.

“It intensifies that discourse and makes it explicitly racial,” said Casey Kelly, a communications professor at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln who for years has pored over transcripts of Trump’s speeches.

At a recent rally in Arizona, he said — falsely — that white people in New York were being sent to the back of line for antiviral treatments.

And now Trump is using the investigations against him — and the prosecutors behind them — as “evidence of a larger systemic pattern that white people don’t have a place in the future of America and he’s the only one that can fight on their behalf,” Kelly said.

Michael Steele, who more than a decade ago was the first African American to chair the Republican National Committee, said Trump was being Trump.

“If he can race bait it, he will. These prosecutors, these Black people are coming after me — the white man,” Steele said.

“They didn’t just wake up and say, ‘I’m gonna waste city resources and state resources to go after Donald Trump,’” said Steele, a member of the Lincoln Project, a Republican group opposed to the former president. “Whether the prosecutors are Black or white, his corruption is still the same. It’s him, his actions, his behavior, his decisions — and that’s where the onus lies.”

There is evidence that Trump’s words have had consequences. Willis — the Georgia prosecutor who asked a judge to impanel a special grand jury to help probe possible “criminal disruptions” by Trump and his allies during the 2020 presidential election and its aftermath — told The Atlanta Journal-Constitution that threats and racist slurs against her have increased since Trump’s rally in Texas.

In a letter to the FBI, Willis called Trump’s rhetoric “alarming.” She called on the FBI to help assess security at the county courthouse and provide personnel to protect the area against possible attack, like the one on the U.S. Capitol a year ago.

Trump has his defenders. Harrison Fields, who worked in the Trump White House, now serves as a spokesman for U.S. Rep. Byron Donalds of Florida, a Trump ally and one of only two Black Republicans serving in the House. He said the country has more important matters to tackle.

Donalds sees Trump’s remarks as “a nonstory, as do about 98% of the American public, who are not in the media, or who are not in the Democrat Party,” Fields said.

“The congressman is focused on issues that actually matter, which is supporting the America-first policies of the former president,” he said.

The flip side of Trump’s aspersions of Black prosecutorial power is the argument that it has been too long in coming.

The country’s system of law and order has long subjugated African Americans — from slavery through the days of Jim Crow until today, some would argue, as some states adopt anti-protest laws and tighter control over the ballot box. Black inmates still disproportionately occupy jail and prison cells.

A 2019 study by the Reflective Democracy Campaign found that only 5% of the country’s elected prosecutors were of color. But Black men and women now lead some of the country’s largest prosecutorial offices, including those in New York, Chicago, Dallas and Detroit.

Trump is questioning their legitimacy, said Diana Becton, another Black district attorney who serves in Contra Costa County in the San Francisco Bay area.

“His accusations are certainly not subtle. They’re frightening,” Becton said. “It’s like saying, we are out of our place, that we’re being uppity and we are going to be put back in our place by people who look like him.”

Middleton, the Texas DA, added that it’s not about unjust laws. There are double standards in how laws are applied. And one remedy is to diversify the people who enforce those laws.

“Certain people get away with things and so we need people who are willing to hold people like Donald Trump accountable,” he said, “where we have to have people in positions of authority who will make sure that all people are treated the same under the law.”

(AP)



3 Responses

  1. At a recent rally in Arizona, he said — falsely — that white people in New York were being sent to the back of line for antiviral treatments.

    This was the case – thankfully it’s been now well reported and hopefully is being managed. It wasn’t false – it is being done in order to withhold more effective c19 protocols, and the hospitals have been incentivized by Biden’s ‘bought’ representation by BigPharma to further empower the poisonous allopathic medical system excesses and forcing the use of respirators and less effective patent remedies – an old story with a new generation of abusive greedmongers at the helm.

    I also don’t think Trump is a racist – he’s mostly frustrated by the democratic hucksters who have strategized to particularly get people of color on the ‘front lines’ of state politics, such as supporting them as DAs, etc., so that the ‘race card’ will be callable as more of a distraction from deeper issues of malfeasance – such as election fraud.

  2. I’m no fan of Trump but in this particular case he is 100% right. As the article itself says he made no reference to anyone’s color. He talks the exact same about white enemies of his

    But the article is right about one thing. Yes there is a danger with the obvious double standard of how BLM rioters versus capital rioters versus are treated . And yes when the black DAs don’t heavily fight street crime but do heavily fight their (white) political enemies (as is currently the case)they are handing a recruitment gift on a silver platter to white supremist and facist groups better than anyone else can posily give them

  3. What a pack of lies. Shame on YWN for the deliberate decision to publish them. You can’t just pass the blame on to them; publishers are responsible for what they choose to publish, even if it’s outside content.

    He repeated his charge of racism, but skipped over an obvious detail: Those prosecutors are Black.

    This reveals the writer’s sick and disgusting attitude — which YWN endorses by republishing it — that black people can’t be racist! What a filthy disgusting idea. Of course blacks can be racist, and many of them are. Racism is far more common among black people that it is among white ones.

    At a recent rally in Arizona, he said — falsely — that white people in New York were being sent to the back of line for antiviral treatments.

    Falsely?! What an outright, wicked lie! YWN is responsible for this: Midvar sheker tirchok. You know very well, or ought to know if you’ve been paying attention to the news, as a news outlet should be expected to, that this is completely TRUE. White people can only receive treatment if they have some special factor that makes them vulnerable, while anyone who isn’t white can be treated without any such factor, simply because they are not white. That is the truth, and anyone who calls it false is a DAMMED LIAR (ki yisocher pi dovrei shoker).

    And no, lastword, it is not being “managed”. It’s being implemented, and is currently the subject of a lawsuit by Prof. Bill Jacobson.

    And after 2017 demonstrations by white supremacists in Charlottesville, Virginia, turned violent, he said at a news conference that there were “very fine people, on both sides.”

    And? There very obviously WERE fine people on both sides of that confrontation. He NEVER said or implied that any of the white supremacists or neonazis were fine people.

    And by the way the demonstration did not “turn violent”. It was violently attacked by Antifa thugs, completely evil people, with the active collusion of the police, the mayor, and the governor; none of them were arrested. The demonstrators, some of whom were fine people and some not so fine, were the VICTIMS; and those of them who fought back had every right to do so. Likewise the counter-demonstration, although it was without a permit, did not consist entirely of Antifa thugs; there were also some fine people who attended merely to peacefully express their left-wing opinions, including the woman who was run over.

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