After a series of statements that have been branded “racist” by critics, beginning with the earliest speeches of his 2016 presidential campaign in which he labeled Mexican immigrants “criminals, drug dealers, rapists, etc.,” as The Washington Post quoted, the label “racist” has come to be widely applied to Trump himself.
In fact, according to a recent poll cited by CT Mirror an overwhelming 80 percent of African-Americans say that Trump is personally racist.
Another poll taken in mid-July showed that 50 percent of all Americans, across racial and ethnic groups, believe that Trump is racist, as The Inquisitr reported. But Trump has appeared oblivious to the racist nature of his comments. In fact, after Trump tweeted that four women of color in Congress should “go back” to countries that they supposedly came from, Trump’s own White House Counselor and spokesperson Kellyanne Conway was forced to explain to Trump why his tweets were racist, as The Inquisitr reported.
But not only has Trump rejected the label “racist” as applied to himself — even lashing out in one Twitter tirade to label one of the highest-ranking African-American members of Congress, Elijah Cummings, a “racist” — being called a racist has “infuriated” Trump, and has been “gnawing at him in recent days,” according to a report published on Sunday.
The report by Washington Post correspondents Philip Rucker and Ashley Parker, says that “Trump has recoiled from being called the r-word, even though some of his actions and words have been plainly racist.”
In a Twitter post on July 31, Trump labeled CNN anchor Don Lemon, who is African-American, “the dumbest man on television,” while in the same tweet declaring himself “the least racist person in the world.”
That tweet came just four days after a Twitter post in which Trump attacked the city of Baltimore, Maryland, which lies in Cummings congressional district, as a “disgusting, rat and rodent infested mess.” The population of Baltimore is 62 percent African-American, according to World Population Review .
Trump, WaPo reported, has simply dismissed the “racist” label as a political attack by Democrats, saying as recently as Friday, “For them to throw out the race word again — racist, racist, racist. They call anybody a racist when they run out of cards.”
Nonetheless, the label upsets Trump because, as former Trump White House spokesperson Anthony Scaramucci explained to The Post , he believes that being branded a racist “it’s bad for business,” and will cost him votes in the 2020 presidential election.
