Trump calls Black prosecutors targeting him ‘racist’

NEW YORK — 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.

Trump faces an array of Black prosecutors: New York Attorney General Letitia James; Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg; Fani Willis, the Fulton County, Ga., district attorney; even Rep. Bennie Thompson, leader of the congressional investigation into the

Jan. 6 insurrection.

The country’s system of law and order has long subjugated African Americans — from slavery through today, some would argue, as some states adopt anti-protest laws and tighter control over the ballot box. Black inmates still disproportionately occupy jail and prison cells.

A 2019 study by the Reflective Democracy Campaign found that only 5% of the country’s elected prosecutors were of color. But Black men and women now lead some of the country’s largest prosecutorial offices, including those in New York, Chicago, Dallas and Detroit.

Trump is questioning their legitimacy, said Diana Becton, a Black district attorney who serves in Contra Costa County.

“His accusations are certainly not subtle. They’re frightening,” Becton said. “It’s like saying, we are out of our place, that we’re being uppity and we are going to be put back in our place by people who look like him.”