Trump’s Twitter History: Black Critics And Political Opponents Are The Real Racists

Sylvia's 50th Anniversary Golden Jubilee at Sylvia's on August 1, 2012 in New York City.
NEW YORK, NY - AUGUST 02: (L-R) Spike Lee and Donald Trump attend "Mike Tyson: Undisputed Truth" Broadway Opening Night at Longacre Theatre on August 2, 2012 in New York City. (Photo by Johnny Nunez/WireImage)
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President Donald Trump on Monday morning reverted back to an old tic on his Twitter account, writing that director Spike Lee had carried out a “racist hit” against him during remarks Sunday at the Academy Awards.

Accepting an adapted screenplay Oscar for his film “BlackKklansman,” Lee said: “The 2020 presidential election is around the corner. Let’s all mobilize. Let’s all be on the right side of history. Make the moral choice between love versus hate. Let’s do the right thing!”

Trump’s tweet got us thinking, and we went digging through eight years of the President’s tweets. A pattern emerged: Trump readily hurls accusations of racism at people of color and white political opponents, but scoffs when those same accusations are directed at him.

Among those who’ve been labeled racists by the President, a few names stick out as especially frequent targets: Former President Barack Obama, for one, and the journalist and pundit Touré. But Trump breezily applies the label to others when convenient; black people are labeled racists at three times the rate whites are, The Washington Post reported in August 2017. And Touré and HBO “Real Sports” host Bryant Gumbel appeared to earn the label for comments unrelated to their views about race, the Post noted.

The white critics Trump has labeled racists include Jon Stewart, the Clintons and Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-MA).

Also, movies and TV shows.

Trump explained away Obama’s polling advantage among black voters as racism.

And he’s spent just as much time on Twitter carefully defining the boundaries of racism to exclude himself.

Once, Trump condemned racism outright on Twitter — albeit he included “all types of racism” — after a year of political pressure following one of his most racist comments as President. A year earlier, Trump asserted there were “some very fine people on both sides” of the white supremacist rally in Charlottesville, Virginia.

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  1. Avatar for tena tena says:

    Have we impeached the motherfucker yet?

    Could we possibly do that by Friday please? God I’m sick of this shit.

  2. Trump a racist? Pfft. He’s a person of color himself. It’s just that the color is orange.

  3. I await the day when someone of authority steps forward and proclaims that “Our long national nightmare is over,” but it damn well better not be Mike Pence!

  4. I assume this falls into the (white supremacy/privilege-protecting) mode of “it’s racist to TALK about race”.

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