Trump Accuses Blacks Of Racism While Ignoring The White Supremacists

After President Donald Trump claimed the “fake news media” forced him to condemn racism as “evil,” and accused “both sides” of complicity in Saturday’s violence in Charlottesville, Virginia, media experts are now analyzing Trump’s Twitter feed for a pattern.

It turns out, the problem is not that Trump refuses to speak about racism.

In fact, just the opposite.

For the past eight years–the length of the first Black president’s tenure–Trump has been more likely to accuse Blacks of racism than whites.  In light of this, Monday’s scripted statement makes a lot more sense.

According to the Trump Twitter Archive, a website that tracks and archives all the president’s tweets, Trump has tweeted the words “racist” or “racism” at least 56 times, two-thirds of which against individuals or groups, three times more against Blacks.

Interestingly, most of Trump’s allegations of racism have been directed at former MSNBC host Touré and HBO “Real Sports” host Bryant Gumbel.

Among other examples of tweets targeting Touré, Trump tweeted:

“Not only is @Toure a racist (and boring), he’s a really dumb guy!”

Against Gumbel, he said:

“In that @TimeWarner has @HBO with really dumb racist Bryant Gumbel(and I mean dumb), and no CBS (which fired Bryant), I am switching bldgs.”

But Touré and Gumbel are certainly not the only targets.

Trump has called talk show host Tavis Smiley a “a hater & racist,” and of course has aimed his vitriol at former President Barack Obama, about which he tweeted: “a total racist?”

In 2012, Trump even went so far as to ask if Black support for Obama was racist.

Trump dubbed the film Django Unchained about a freed slave “The most racist movie I have ever seen.”

About the television sitcom Blackish, featuring a middle-class Black family, he inquired if the title implied “racism at the highest level.”

He has also been quick to accuse other whites of racism, such as former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, about which he said she “needs to address the racist undertones of her 2008 campaign;” Massachusetts Sen. Elizabeth Warren, he labeled “Very racist!”; and former CBS late-night talk show host David Letterman, who “must apologize for his racist comment.”

Trump even had the propensity to allude to racism without directly accusing anyone of it, such as what he tweeted on election day in 2012:

“If you voted for Obama in 2008 to prove you were not a racist then vote for Romney in 2012 to prove you are not stupid. “

Half of those 18 tweets are flat-out denials he is a racist, such as what he tweeted in June 2016:

“Don King, and so many other African Americans who know me well and endorsed me, would not have done so if they thought I was a racist.”

Other tweets show gratitude toward individuals for apologizing for calling Trump racist, such as Rev. Al Sharpton, David Letterman, and former CNBC host Donny Deutsch.

A mainstay of right-wing ideology is the discredited belief whites face more discrimination than Blacks. Trump is feeding into this narrative.

In 2013, Trump said:

“Isn’t it intetesting [sic] that anybody who attacks President Obama is considered a racist by the real racists out there!”  

The president doth protest too much, methinks.

Ted Millar is writer and teacher. His work has been featured in myriad literary journals, including Better Than Starbucks, The Broke Bohemian, Straight Forward Poetry, Caesura, Circle Show, Cactus Heart, Third Wednesday, and The Voices Project. He is also a contributor to The Left Place blog on Substack, and Medium.