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To Trump, Black people are the real racists

The president has a long history of speaking against Black identity.

Photo of David Covucci

David Covucci

Trump tweets calling Black people racist

This weekend, President Donald Trump said he was not racist. And while the president strenuously objects to people calling him racist—including once calling the question of whether he was racist “insulting“—he has no problem lobbing the invective himself.

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His preferred target? Black people.

It begins where everything with Trump does: Barack Obama.

The president has long had tremendous animosity toward America’s first Black president—running a campaign to prove Obama wasn’t an American citizen—but he has also repeatedly called him a racist on Twitter.

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The Katrina speech Trump is referring to was a flashpoint in the 2012 campaign, which revived the debate over whether Obama supported the incendiary remarks of Rev. Jeremiah Wright, who was considered racially divisive for attacking America’s attitude toward Blacks. Obama’s disawoval wasn’t enough for Trump, who continued to rail against the then-president.

Before that, Trump even went so far as to speculate that every African-American who supported Obama was racist.

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In Trump’s mind, any Black person who speaks out against the racism Black people face is the real racist. It’s the reverse-racism, white-grievance politics that have manifested themselves in the Republican Party ever since the Civil Rights movement. And Trump has embraced it full-throated.

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He had harsh words for sports anchor Bryant Gumbel, who spoke out against the lack of diversity on the U.S. Winter Olympic team and who once compared former NBA Commissioner David Stern to a “plantation owner.”

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Trump also attacked writer Touré, who has written books like Who’s Afraid of Post-Blackness?: What it Means to be Black Now.

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A Washington Post study, in the wake of Charlottesville, found that Trump called Black people racist on Twitter three times as much as he did white people.

But it isn’t just people. Trump also has railed against Black identity in pop culture. He touted the tired argument about how ABC’s Blackish was unfair to white people.

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And he had a blunt assessment of Django Unchained.

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Trump sees the expression of Black identity as a threat to whites. And for someone who was so slow to condemn actual white supremacists in Charlottesville, his history speaks much louder than his denials.

 
The Daily Dot