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Trump claims congresswomen of color are the real ‘racists’

President Donald Trump has defended white nationalists, but loves to call racial minorities "racist."

President Donald Trump has praised and campaigned with white nationalist Rep. Steve King (R-IA)
President Donald Trump has praised and campaigned with white nationalist Rep. Steve King (R-IA) (Photo credit: Stephen Maturen/Getty Images)

President Donald Trump continued his Twitter assault on four Democratic congresswomen of color Monday, accusing them of being a “very Racist [sic] group of troublemakers who are young, inexperienced, and not very smart.” The “Squad” he is referencing — Reps. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-NY), Ilhan Omar (D-MN), Ayanna Pressley (D-MA), and Rashida Tlaib (D-MI) — is but the latest in a long line of racial and ethnic minorities who Trump has smeared as the real racists.

But when it comes to actual racism, Trump has often not only refused to condemn it, he has regularly engaged in it himself. And he has struggled to distance himself from his white nationalist supporters, sometimes praising them as very good people.

Trump’s Twitter archive tells the story.

When it comes to people of color, Trump time and again has accused them — typically without any evidence — of being racists. These have included:

President Barack Obama

Black voters who preferred Obama to Mitt Romney in 2012

Filmmaker Spike Lee

The ABC sitcom black-ish

Author and talk show host Tavis Smiley

Writer and culture critic Touré 

Television host and sportscaster Bryant Gumbel

Trump even took aim at Quentin Tarantino’s film Django Unchained, which he called “racist” for its portrayal of abusive slave owners in the South.

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He has been far less critical of actual racism.  After demanding that Ocasio-Cortez, Omar, Pressley, and Tlaib go back to the countries they came from (all but Omar are natural-born United States citizens; Omar emigrated from Somalia as a child and became a citizen as a child), Trump lashed out at those who called his racist tweets racist.

After a 2017 white nationalist march in Charlottesville, Virginia, turned deadly, Trump claimed that both the racists and the people gathered to oppose them were equally culpable. He blamed “many sides” while praise the “very fine people on both sides” of the issue.

He defended abusive football coaches, lamenting that it is considered “discriminatory, racist” and “bullying” when they hurl slurs at players.

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And as a candidate in 2016, Trump once refused to disavow support from a former Ku Klux Klan grand wizard, falsely claiming that he knew “nothing about David Duke” and “nothing about white supremacists.”

After white nationalist Rep. Steve King (R-IA) defended white supremacy in January, Trump declined to denounce him, saying, “I really haven’t been following it.” Five years earlier, Trump feted King as a “special guy, a smart person, with really the right views on almost everything.”