Trump escalates attacks on blacks

WASHINGTON — President Trump, after a weekend spent attacking a leading African American congressman from Baltimore, widened his war on critics of color Monday as he denounced the Rev. Al Sharpton as “a con man” who “Hates Whites & Cops!”

Trump seemed to be responding to a Twitter post in which Sharpton showed himself at an airport “headed to Baltimore,” presumably a reference to the president’s attacks on Rep. Elijah Cummings, the Democrat who represents much of Maryland’s largest city.

“I have known Al for 25 years,” Trump wrote on Twitter as he reposted Sharpton’s tweet. “Went to fights with him & Don King, always got along well. He ‘loved Trump!’ He would ask me for favors often. Al is a con man, a troublemaker, always looking for a score. Just doing his thing. Must have intimidated Comcast/ NBC. Hates Whites & Cops!” Sharpton fired back. “Trump says I’m a troublemaker & con man,” he wrote on Twitter. “I do make trouble for bigots. If he really thought I was a con man he would want me in his Cabinet.”

Sharpton, a longtime civil rights leader and MSNBC host, has indeed known Trump from their days in New York together and has grown increasingly critical of the president over the years. He has been particularly outspoken in recent weeks as Trump criticized four firstterm Democratic congresswomen of color, demanding they “go back” to their home countries even though all of them are U.S. citizens — three of them were born in the United States and the fourth was naturalized as a teenager.

The flareup with Sharpton came after Trump bashed Cummings over the weekend, saying the congressman should spend less time criticizing the president’s handling of detained migrants at the southwestern border and more time fixing his “disgusting, rat and rodent infested” district where “no human being would want to live.”