Nobody ever accused Donald Trump of not knowing his constituency.
Having lost the presidency, having made a list of suspects behind the “steal” (which he concocted long before losing), he and his MAGA kin have compiled a list of new offenses linked to the theft.
The terms fit well with the old Jim Crow standby, “driving while Black”:
Voting while Black.
Tabulating votes while Black.
Serving on a jury while Black.
Being a prosecutor while Black.
Officiating a criminal trial while Black.
If I hear Trump correctly — and his supporters do – one trait alone makes all of the above unfit, assuming they are Democrats, which most Black people are. Any wonder why?
If you’re one of those Black people, you can’t count votes without cheating. Just ask Trump. You can’t administer elections fairly. You can’t investigate and prosecute crimes fairly. You can’t be a fair judge.
You might call this a gross generalization, and you’re right. If you consider them gross, however, please consider their source.
Look back through the conspiracy to negate the will of America’s voters and wonder: If Black voters and Black election officials didn’t exist, whom would Trump blame for having lost?
Without Blacks – the kind who vote or the kind who run elections, which inner-city precincts would Rudy Giuliani, without any evidence, assert were corrupt. Philadelphia, for instance. He asserted it was guilty of election illegalities for “many, many years.”
Just like inner-city Detroit, and Milwaukee, and Minneapolis, and of course Atlanta.
What do those places have in common, eh, Rudy?
One thing they had in common was hard-working, low-paid election workers like Atlanta’s Ruby Freeman and Shaye Moss, the horrifying defamation of whom has Giuliani in the crosshairs of a slander judgment.
If Trump isn’t sued for the same thing, something is very wrong. He called Freeman a “professional vote scammer” without any evidence, without any shame.
He made defamatory claims of the two women 18 times in his “I need 11,000 votes” call to Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger.
Talk about organized crime. What Trump, Giuliani and co-conspirators did to Freeman and Moss is, writes CNN’s Stephen Collison, “one of the most pernicious acts” of any White House occupant.
Listen to Trump and Giuliani: How could anyone trust the vote in Fulton County? So many Blacks.
I wonder how many Republicans who still support Trump know his people tried to extort a false confession out of Freeman with a plant dispatched to scare her.
Go ahead. Pick nits from Fulton County D.A. Fani Willis’s sprawling RICO case. If every other claim she makes about this conspiracy fell flat, the damage Trump and Co. did to these two women would merit jail time.
So many public servants have paid a price for Trump’s vicious lies about a vote that his own election security expert said was “the most secure in American history.” Of course, that elections expert got fired for it.
Now Trump aims his lies at U.S. District Judge Tanya Chutkin, Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg, New York Attorney General Letitia James and D.A. Willis, calling each unfit (based on what?) or racist (based on you know what).
He says he cannot get a fair trial in Washington, Manhattan and Fulton County, largely because the jury might be contaminated with you-know-what, or whom, as it were.
No better example exists of the racism that invades his very bones and that of the MAGA movement.
Psychologists point to projection as the act of accusing someone of the very crime or condition of which an accuser knows his or her own guilt.
Trump’s former fixer Michael Cohen, who went to jail for doing his boss’s bidding, knows this too well.
The braying we’ve come to expect from Trump, said Cohen, is “always about deflection, and it’s always about projection. Because he believes everyone is guilty and as underhanded as he. And so, he wants to be first in line. It’s a real psychosis.”
If the Republican Party ever again presumes to represent and serve this broad and diverse nation, it needs to renounce this man and what he stands for, then throw itself on a psychiatrist’s couch.
Longtime newspaperman John Young lives in Colorado. Email: jyoungcolumn@gmail.com.
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