Trump escalates his racist attacks on Black Americans
Failure to connect this to our worsening democratic crisis is an act of complicity
Donald Trump is not a subtle man. Given his core nature and personality, Trump’s attacks on prominent Black Americans have recently become even more explicit and direct.
First, he accused former President Barack Obama of “treasonous” behavior for launching an investigation into Russian interference in the 2016 election.
But that was not the end of it. On Monday, following a criminal referral from Trump’s Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard, Attorney General Pam Bondi ordered federal prosecutors to open a grand jury investigation into the baseless accusations.
Multiple investigations, including two led by Republicans, and other reporting have repeatedly shown that Russia did, in fact, seek to meddle in the election in favor of Trump over former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton by launching a social media disinformation campaign using Russian bot farms, and by hacking the Clinton campaign’s emails.
With Trump’s consolidation of power and lack of traditional guardrails, he has the full power of the state at his command to advance his authoritarian campaign against Obama, Clinton and other people and groups that he has already targeted — or will soon be targeting — for “treason” and other “crimes.”
No such conspiracy on Obama’s part exists. But with Trump’s consolidation of power and lack of traditional guardrails, he has the full power of the state at his command to advance his authoritarian campaign against Obama, Clinton and other people and groups that he has already targeted — or will soon be targeting — for “treason” and other “crimes.”
In the meantime, Trump has placed other prominent Black people in his sights. Last week, Trump targeted Beyoncé, Oprah Winfrey, Al Sharpton and others with claims they were part of a conspiracy in which they were paid to endorse his rival, former Vice President Kamala Harris, in the 2024 election.
“IT’S NOT LEGAL!” he posted on Truth Social. “For these unpatriotic ‘entertainers,’ this was just a CORRUPT & UNLAWFUL way to capitalize on a broken system.”
Trump said he would soon “call for a major investigation.”
On Fox News’ “My View with Lara Trump,” Charlamagne tha God said “the least of us are still being impacted the worst” and was critical of Trump’s response to the Epstein scandal.
Then, in a Truth Social Post on Monday, Trump criticized CBS journalist Gayle King, who is also Winfrey’s best friend. “Gayle King’s career is over. She should have stayed with her belief in TRUMP. She never had the courage to do so. No talent, no ratings, no strength!!!”
But the president still was not finished with his bigoted provocations.
These are all — Trump’s slur that Winfrey, Beyoncé and other Black celebrities are basically crooks, and that Black people are inherently lazy — centuries-old white supremacist tropes.
His behavior is part of a much larger pattern of behavior where he has repeatedly insulted Black people, specifically Black women, as being dumb or stupid or “low IQ.”
This is the same white racist “logic” used to justify Black chattel slavery and over 100 years of American apartheid and racial tyranny in the South, and other parts of the country, under the period of Jim Crow and into the post-civil rights era and beyond.
The National Museum of African American History and Culture explains the origins of the stereotype that Black people are somehow inherently “lazy” as compared to white people and other “races” as: Many of the stereotypes created during the height of the trans-Atlantic Slave Trade and were used to help commodify black bodies and justify the business of slavery. For instance, an enslaved person, forced under violence to work from sunrise to sunset, could hardly be described as lazy. Yet laziness, as well as characteristics of submissiveness, backwardness, lewdness, treachery, and dishonesty, historically became stereotypes assigned to African Americans.
Trump’s racist attacks merited media attention. But it did not receive the in-depth coverage it deserved.
As Bill Kristol, Andrew Egger and Jim Swift of The Bulwark observed of Trump’s accusations of treason against Obama, “You might expect it to be big news. And yet it faded into the background almost at once. How far through the looking glass are we, that this sort of thing reads to so many as a ‘dog bites man’ story?…”
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