Donald Trump goes on thinly veiled racist late night Twitter bender
After Donald Trump was pressured today into belatedly and half heartedly reading a prepared speech condemning his own white supremacist supporters, it was inevitable that he would end up rebelling against his own move. Sure enough, on Monday evening, Trump went on a late night Twitter retweet bender that could alternately be described as racist, alt-right, warmongering, and race baiting.
Trump retweeted pizzagate conspiracist Jack Posobiec after he complained that there had been “39 shootings in Chicago this weekend, 9 deaths. No national media outrage. Why is that?” It was a clear attempt at minimizing this weekend’s deadly terrorist attack by a white supremacist Trump supporter, by randomly comparing it to violence in a heavily African-American city. This came shortly after Trump posted a tweet of his own, which many observers have interpreted as having been a thinly veiled message of solidarity his white supremacist base.
Trump tweeted “Feels good to be home after seven months, but the White House is very special, there is no place like it… and the U.S. is really my home!” (link). Many respondents stated that they felt Trump was invoking his longtime false claim that President Obama had been born outside of the United States. And considering how bizarre the tweet was overall, it’s not difficult to come around to concluding that it probably was nothing more than a signal to his base.
This was just a few hours after Donald Trump launched a vicious attack on Merck CEO Ken Frazier, who had resigned from Trump’s manufacturing advisory council earlier in the day, citing Trump’s failed response to Charlottesville. Trump didn’t attack the two other CEOs who resigned from that same council on Monday. As was widely noted, Frazier is a black guy, while the other two guys who resigned are white. So this was apparently yet another racist signal that Trump was sending to his white supremacist base.
