Yes….
Race politics is a ‘trade mark’ of Donald Trump’s business and politics form back in the day to the present….
He seldom gets called out for it….
But it works with his supporters….
And Republican’s a LARGE extend….
Indictment season is officially underway and Donald Trump’s legal Houdini act is closing after a fifty-year run. Yes, he’s making history. But let’s focus for just a moment on the prosecutors leading the investigations that may finally hold him to account. Who they are, and the disturbing nature of Trump’s attacks against them, will shape the 2024 campaign and American democracy itself.
Before Trump became the first former president to be indicted, there was the first black person elected district attorney of Manhattan, Alvin Bragg. There was the first woman (and first black woman) elected district attorney of Fulton County, Georgia, Fani Willis. And there was Letitia “Tish” James, who in 2018 shattered “a trio of racial and gender barriers,” as the New York Times put it: first woman to be elected New York attorney general, first black woman to be elected to statewide office, first black person to serve as attorney general.
Blood, sweat, and tears doesn’t even begin to describe what it’s taken to get here; the very date of Trump’s arraignment—on the 55th anniversary of Martin Luther King Jr.’s murder in Memphis—revives the painful past. You could, if you appreciated U.S. history, celebrate so many glass ceilings in fragments on the ground. Bragg, Willis, and James are proof that the American dream, and MLK’s dream, are alive….
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Shades of 2016, when Trump repeatedly lashed out at a judge overseeing a class-action fraud lawsuit against Trump University in San Diego. The case was eventually settled for $25 million, but not before Trump had called Judge Gonzalo Curiel a “hater” who would be “extremely unfair” to Trump because Curiel, born in Indiana, was Hispanic and Mexican and Trump wanted to build a wall on the U.S.-Mexican border. Why were we shocked? In his first speech as a candidate in 2015, Trump said Mexico sends America criminals and rapists instead of “their best.”
Trump’s brand is spewing abuse, and he certainly has not spared Jack Smith, the Justice Department special counsel handling the investigations into the Mar-a-Lago documents and efforts to overturn the 2020 election, including the January 6th Capitol attack. Trump has called Smith, who is white, “a terrorist,” a “THUG,” a “fully weaponized monster,” a “Mad Dog Psycho,” and a “hit man” for Democrats “who may very well turn out to be a criminal.”
But the way Trump goes after black and Hispanic prosecutors and judges poses a special menace because of the example he sets—the permission structure he creates—for white nationalism, white supremacy, racism, antisemitism, and immigrant-bashing. There’s no forgetting any of it, from “very fine people on both sides,” to “shithole countries” like Haiti and African nations, to insulting black people as low-IQ, to “stand back and stand by,” to dining at Mar-a-Lago with Nick Fuentes, an antisemitic white supremacist….
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Last week’s rule-of-law breakthrough almost certainly previews more to come. And for Trump, these reckonings are not just threats to his personal future and liberty. They involve three prosecutors who embody a national racial transformation that Trump has exploited from the start to raise money, inflame resentments, and win support. Let’s not lose sight of them amid the legal storms and all-cap Trump onslaughts ahead….