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More Media Outlets Call Out Trump’s Racism

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Will They Report How President Gets Away With It?


From left, Reps. Rashida Tlaib, Ilhan Omar, Ayanna Pressley and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, hold news conference Monday to respond to President Trump’s tweets. (Credit: Elyse Samuels, Allie Caren/Washington Post) (video)

Will They Report How President Gets Away With It?

No more “racially tinged.” Let’s just say “racism.”

Less about “minorities.” We’re talking about congressional “women of color.” (The Washington Post was a notable exception.)

People don’t feel threatened by generic, colorless “minorities.” Many do feel that way, though, about black and brown people, more easily portrayed as “the other.”

Norah O’Donnell’s debut night as anchor of the “CBS Evening News” Monday was a case in point.

O’Donnell referred to President Trump’s weekend tweets as “racist.” The four targeted congressional women were “of color.”

She turned to Major Garrett, CBS’ chief Washington correspondent, who explained the political calculation behind Trump’s resort to racism.

“The president believes there is something advantageous about drawing accusations of either being a racist or having racist motivations,” Garrett said in an expanded version of his comments. “What does he see to be the advantage? Well, he will argue to his supporters that the whole conversation about what is or isn’t racist has become, from his perspective and the perspective of Trump supporters, so out of shape, so misshapen by quote, unquote ‘political correctness’  it’s lost its meaning.

“Therefore, the president says, you call me a racist, I’ll call you a racist, which is what he did to [House] Speaker [Nancy] Pelosi. Essentially trying to dilute the meaning and the importance of that very explosive charge. . . .”

Over on NBC, “Nightly News” anchor Lester Holt was still couching the R-word inside such terminology as “widely slammed as racist” or a “demeaning phrase often used by racists,” though reporter Hallie Jackson more bluntly said Trump “fans the flames of racial resentment” and had used “a racist trope meant to marginalize people of color.” Cecilia Vega also used “women of color” and “racist tweet” in her report for ABC (video).

Trump tweeted Sunday that if lawmakers “hate our country,” they can go back to their “broken and crime-infested” countries. His remarks were directed at four congresswomen: Reps. Ilhan Omar of Minnesota, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez of New York, Ayanna Pressley of Massachusetts and Rashida Tlaib of Michigan. All are American citizens and three of the four were born in the United States.

CNN’s Brian Stelter wrote Monday in his “Reliable Sources” email, “In yesterday’s newsletter I showed that most of the country’s most popular news outlets were refraining from calling Trump’s tweets ‘racist’ — CNN being the biggest exception.

“But on Monday this changed in a big way. Outlets like The AP and CBS stopped attributing the word ‘racist’ to ‘critics’ and stated it as a fact, in an institutional voice. This evolution was evident throughout the day: The morning show on CBS leaned on ‘critics,’ but the network’s evening newscast said ‘racist tweets.’ Notably, it was on Norah O’Donnell’s debut as the new ‘Evening News” anchor. Over on NBC, correspondent Hallie Jackson said Trump was ‘deploying a racist trope meant to marginalize people of color.’ . . .”

In March, The Associated Press announced it was updating its stylebook to include “Do not use racially charged, [racially divisive, racially tinged] or similar terms as euphemisms for racist or racism when the latter terms are truly applicable. . . .”

Washington Post media columnist Margaret Sullivan wrote Monday that this is one time the AP’s guidance should be taken to heart. “Journalists don’t need to see themselves as political advocates when they say obvious things in plain terms,” Sullivan said. “And doing so doesn’t make them Democratic operatives as their pro-Trump critics are sure to charge.

“It just means they are doing the most fundamental job they have: telling the truth as plainly and directly as possible.”

Reporters sought out Republican members of Congress, who have largely been quiet about the racism of Trump’s tweets and, more important, actions. Legislators such as Sen. Mitt Romney of Utah or Rep. James Comer of Kentucky denied that what Trump said was racist, though it might have been unfortunate. Others, on various platforms, traced Trump’s racism back to 1973, when the Justice Department investigated real-estate dealer Fred Trump and his son, Donald, over housing discrimination.

What reporters have not yet explained satisfactorily is how followers of now-President Trump so easily buy what Trump is selling.

Garrett explained the Trump technique on CBS:

“The other dimension of this for the president — long running, is he invites the charges of racism to draw attention to some other issue that he wants scrutinized or evaluated more deeply, whether it’s national security, immigration, the economy, or, today, what is patriotism, what does it mean to love America? He wants to draw these lines as sharply, as brightly, as aggressively and in some cases in the minds of many, so menacingly as to create an aura of intimidation and to rally his supporters around these concepts — the economy, national security, immigration, patriotism.

“That’s why invites these charges, that’s why he tends to weaponize them, and they will be in his mind important, and potentially helpful, until they are not. . . .

“The president . . . pretends that what was said that was so incendiary either wasn’t said, wasn’t incendiary or no longer matters. And because he knows, as a former GOP front-runner and now president of the United States, he always gets the last word or the next to the last word.

“And so we very rapidly went from, wait a minute, you said, ‘Go back to from where you came from.’ Three of the congresswomen that you mentioned in your tweet were born in America. How erroneous, how flagrantly erroneous could you be? And how not only not wedded to any sort of fact, but anything that’s even credible in this argument?

“The president blows right by that, and says, ‘I’m just talking about America. Don’t you love it? If you don’t love America, maybe you should leave,’ harkening back to a sentiment that was on bumper stickers when I was a kid, in the late ’60s, early ’70s, ‘America, Love it or Leave It.’

“And if you want to sort of understand the ideological, if you will, incubator of much of the president’s ideas about this, it is that period of time, ’60s and ’70s, when he believes America began to get pulled apart, by racial tensions or racial entitlement or quotas, things of that nature.

“And he uses this language . . .  reminiscent to anyone who was alive then of those underlying sentiments. And again, he will continue to do so until it proves, if it ever does, politically injurious. . . .”

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