Donald Trump’s racism rears its ugly head yet again
Whenever there’s a violent attack on United States soil and the perpetrator is a Muslim or an immigrant or a nonwhite person, Donald Trump races to Twitter as quickly as he can, in order to cast that event within the framework of his racist and xenophobic agenda. Whenever a violent attack happens that doesn’t fit his racist agenda, things tend to go very differently.
Over the weekend Trump saw fit to post rants on Twitter about everything from a “drunk/drugged up loser” associate of his, to the cartoon character Mr. Magoo. Yet as of the time of publication of this article, Trump still has yet to acknowledge the deadly shooting at a Waffle House in Nashville. It’s not difficult to figure out why, and all you have to do is look at the photos included with the reporting on the incident.
The suspect in the shooting is a white guy. The hero, who grabbed the assault rifle away from the shooter, is a black guy. Trump doesn’t do much if any reading, but the photos and captions on this CNN article alone are enough to make clear that this shooting doesn’t fit with Trump’s racist and xenophobic narrative. So of course he hasn’t bothered to acknowledge it, even as law enforcement is hailing James Shaw Jr as a hero who put himself at risk and saved countless lives.
The way this usually works is that after enough public backlash has accumulated over Donald Trump’s refusal to acknowledge a major incident that doesn’t fit with his racist agenda, he (or more likely one of his staffers) belatedly posts something about it on Twitter. So maybe that will have happened by the time you’re reading this article. But if this had been an incident where the shooter was a black person, or a Muslim, or an immigrant, we’d have seen Trump tweeting “I told you so” within minutes.
