Trump escalates his racist attacks on Black Americans

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. 

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.”

Again, no such conspiracy exists.

On Aug. 1, Trump called radio personality Charlamagne tha God, who is a Black man, a “low IQ individual” and a “racist sleazebag” because he dared to question the president’s policies and behavior. 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. On Tuesday, he escalated his racist appeals, telling CNBC in a phone interview that “inner city” people — a not-so-subtle code for Black Americans — are lazy. “Illegal aliens” — meaning Hispanics and Latinos — are strong and have a natural talent for physical labor, he said. “[P]eople that live in the inner city are not doing that work. They’re just not doing that work, and they’ve tried, we’ve tried, everybody tried, they don’t do it…These people do it naturally, naturally.”

These are all — Trump’s slur that Winfrey, Beyoncé and other Black celebrities are basically crooks, and that Black people are inherently lazy — are centuries-old white supremacist tropes. His comments are 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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In a searing essay, former MSNBC host and author Joy Reid captured the moment:

I guess we Blacks can just hang it up, at this point. Companies have effectively been told they’re not allowed to hire us anywhere…Presumably, the regime envisions whatever Black people, brown people, women and LGBTQ people who aren’t deported, working as maids in white Christian homes, like in the ‘good old days’ when America was great…

Filmmaker Kevin Willmott put it another way in The Nation: “The Confederacy has gobbled up the Union…The entire nation is capitulating to the new Confederate States of America.”

The mainstream media’s failure to consistently connect Trump’s racism and authoritarianism to the nation’s worsening democratic crisis is not a mere “failure of imagination.” It is an act of complicity that further normalizes racism and authoritarianism in the Age of Trump. Further, as media critics like Dan Froomkin and Mark Jacob have argued, it is actually a willful refusal to understand how racism and authoritarianism intersect and amplify the other’s power to erode human freedom, dignity, agency and flourishing across racial lines.

The normalization of Trump and the MAGA Republicans’ authoritarianism (if not naked fascism), racism and general hostility towards Black and brown people is not abstract. Such values and policies have significant negative health, emotional, material and other detrimental outcomes. This is not a coincidence or accident. It is the predictable and de facto desired outcome and goal.

Philosopher and public intellectual Cornel West has described Black Americans as historically existing in a state of being “unsafe, unprotected, subject to random violence, and hated for who they are.” Psychologists and other experts described the sum effect of these forces as causing “racial battle fatigue” — a form of collective post-traumatic stress disorder — among Black people and other non-whites in America and across the West. For example, public health and other experts have demonstrated how racial fatigue shortens the lives of people of color because of how chronic stress from navigating a society where racial discrimination profoundly shapes life outcomes. To that point, racial battle fatigue has been shown to lead to premature aging through epigenetic processes.

How much longer will Black Americans and the heirs to other great freedom struggles keep sacrificing for a country that is choosing self-destruction — for a nation accelerating toward fascism? What will happen then if those who are the conscience of the nation decide to turn their backs on it? 

What is the cost of loving a country that does not love you back?

I don’t pretend to have an answer. But I do know this: If those Americans who are the conscience of the nation turn away from it, the consequences for the country’s future will be nothing short of existential.

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