So an opinion piece on the Washington Post site talks about how Trump keeps targeting prominent African-Americans with his tweets:
So the real kicker is that when the writer of the article tweeted a link to it, the President responded with his usual degree of thoughtfulness and tact.
Let's be clear about this: President Trump regularly goes out of his way to attack prominent African Americans not just to "stoke the culture wars," as this euphemism often has it — but, more precisely, to stoke the sense among many of his supporters that the system is unfairly rigged on behalf of minorities, and that he's here to put things right.
This morning, Trump once again tweeted angrily about LaVar Ball, the father of a UCLA basketball player who, along with two others, had been released by China after getting arrested for shoplifting. But what's particularly noteworthy is that only minutes later Trump then tweeted about kneeling football players. What's the connection there?
The immediate segue to kneeling football players is suggestive, and reminds us that we're seeing a pattern in Trump's public flaying of prominent African Americans. It is true that in some of these cases, Trump was attacked or at least criticized first. But it's hard to avoid noticing a gratuitously ugly pattern in Trump's responses, in which Trump vaguely suggests either that his targets are getting above their station, or that they're asking for too much and are insufficiently thankful for all that has been done for them.
Writing in the Atlantic this week, Adam Serwer suggested that Trump's frequent race-baiting has two crucial components. First, there's the ongoing suggestion that minorities enjoy various special privileges that unfairly rig the game against struggling white people, which Trump will reverse with justifiably discriminatory policies. (Polling has suggested many Trump voters did believe that such special privileges were harming whites.) Second, there's the crucial ingredient of deniability — the simultaneous notion that Trump is entirely innocent of any racially discriminatory motives, and even that the very suggestion otherwise constitutes another injustice heaped upon Trump and his supporters.
So the real kicker is that when the writer of the article tweeted a link to it, the President responded with his usual degree of thoughtfulness and tact.