NEW YORK (AP) — Looking out at a sea of faces at a Texas fairground, most of them white, former President Donald Trump seethed about his legal troubles and blamed them on malicious prosecutors.
“These prosecutors are vicious, horrible people. They’re racists and they’re very sick, they’re mentally sick,” Trump said, before warning his audience: “In reality, they’re not after me. They’re after you.”
He repeated his charge of racism, but skipped over an obvious detail: Those prosecutors are Black.
His diatribe left the clear impression that Trump, who rode the politics of white grievance into the White House, thinks he can’t possibly be treated fairly by Black officials.
The comments carry the echoes of racist messages that have proliferated in recent years –- that Black people and other minorities are taking power, and that they will exact revenge on white people, or at the very least treat white people as they have been treated.
That’s among the fears stoking the white supremacy movement, the so-called “white replacement theory” that people of color will supplant whites in the country’s power dynamics and social structure.
“These are the same justifications that they use for Jim Crow laws and their mistreatment of African Americans. So this is just a rerun of what we’ve seen in our country,” said one Black district attorney, Brian Middleton of Fort Bend County, Texas, which lies southwest of central Houston.
Trump attacking prosecutors is nothing new. When his business and political dealings are investigated, he often strikes back with accusations of misconduct and witch hunts.
The former president has long been accused of biogtry. Before the 2016 election, Trump called U.S. District Judge Gonzalo Curiel a “hater” who could not be fair to him in a fraud case...
