Trump has absolutely no idea what black America looks like
Rep. John Lewis is the son of sharecroppers. As a child, he wanted to be a preacher; he practiced by delivering fiery sermons to the family’s chickens. But history had other plans for him: lunch counter sit-ins, Freedom Rides, the March on Washington, the Edmund Pettus Bridge, a seat in Congress representing most of Atlanta. No sane person would accuse such a man of being “all talk, talk, talk — no action or results.”
But that is precisely what Donald Trump said of Lewis. It was not the first time the president-elect raised questions about his own sanity, and I doubt it will be the last.
As I’ve said before, Trump’s compulsion to answer any perceived slight with both barrels blazing is a sign of dangerous insecurity and weakness, not strength. We are about to inaugurate a president with the social maturity of a first-grader.
There is another troubling aspect of this episode, however: Trump took a gratuitous swipe at Lewis’s majority-black congressional district, saying it was “in horrible shape and falling apart (not to mention crime infested).” In a subsequent tweet, he said Lewis “should finally focus on the burning and crime infested inner-cities of the U.S.”
We’ve heard this sort of thing before from Trump. When he thinks of African Americans, Trump apparently pictures “inner cities” that are Godforsaken hellholes of despair. He sees dystopian enclaves beset with record levels of crime — ramshackle places that are “falling apart” in every sense ...