Trump attacked a black woman on Twitter? No shocker there
It’s no surprise that Tomeka Hart would speak out for the prosecutors who quit the Roger Stone case after the Justice Department heeded President Donald Trump’s tweets and not their sentencing recommendations.
Speaking out for others is literally what Hart, a longtime education advocate in Memphis, does.
But what’s also not surprising is Trump’s Twitter attack on Hart, who served as the jury forewoman in Stone’s trial. It’s what he does — especially when it comes to women of color who challenge him.
So now, Hart is part of that club.
More inside
And she should be proud.
After prosecutors recommended a federal prison sentence of seven to
nine years for Trump's ally, Stone, on charges of lying to Congress, tampering with a witness and obstructing the House investigation into whether Trump's campaign worked with Russia to influence the 2016 election, the Justice Department recommended that they come with a lighter sentence.
That recommendation, which came in the wake of Trump's rage-tweeting about the unfairness of it all, infuriated the case's prosecutors: Jonathan Kravis, Aaron S.J. Zelinsky, Adam C. Jed and Michael J. Marando. They indicated their disgust by resigning.
So, Hart, being the advocate that she is, advocated for them.
“The prosecutors who have now resigned did a masterful job of laying out every element of every charge, backed with ample evidence,” Hart wrote in a Facebook post. “… They acted with the utmost intelligence, integrity, and respect for our system of justice.
“For that, I wanted to speak up for them and ask you to join me in thanking them for their service.”
And for that, Trump attacked her. He tweeted that it looked like the “fore person in the jury, in the Roger Stone case, had significant bias.” He didn't mention Seth Cousins, another Stone juror who defended its decision last December in a piece in The Washington Post, and whose reasoning Hart largely referred to in her post, in that tweet.
But that's not surprising.
It's not surprising because Trump reserves a special brand of vitriol for women of color who question or call out him or his administration.
Trump is the man who, in 2018, called April Ryan, White House correspondent for Urban Radio Network, a “loser” who “doesn't know what the hell she's doing.”
That same year, he accused PBS Newshour correspondent Yamiche Alcindor of asking a “racist question” because she questioned him about his claims that he was a nationalist — a coded appeal to racists.
He also told CNN correspondent Abby Phillip, when she asked him whether he wanted acting Attorney General Matt Whitaker torein in special prosecutor Robert Mueller, that her question was “stupid,” and “I watch you a lot, and you ask a lot of stupid questions.”
And last year, he tweeted that U.S. Reps. Ilhan Omar, D-minnesota; Alexandria Ocasio-cortez, D-new York; Rashida Tlaib, D-michigan; and Ayanna Pressley, D-massachusetts, should go back to their own countries.
All are women of color — and what Trump's attack on Hart shares in common with his other attacks on women like her, and how it differs from his attacks on white men or women, is that they usually revolve around their honesty, or their competency, or their temperament.
By tweeting that Hart was biased, even though she referred to Cousin's piece as to how the jury arrived at its conclusion and how she was defending the prosecutors as a matter of the rule of law, Trump continues a pattern of targeting women of color who challenge him — in hopes that his contempt for them continues to churn the racism that powers much of his base.
But that's all the more reason why Hart should be admired for speaking out.
She took a risk, but it's a risk that puts her in that club of women of color who understand that as our institutions are being tested by a president who regularly defies norms, someone has to remind people what normal is.
This time, that someone happened to be Hart.
Tonyaa Weathersbee can be reached at tonyaa.weathersbee@commercialappeal.com, and you can follow her on Twitter @tonyaajw.