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Donald Trump’s pretrial screeds against Alvin Bragg were filled with coded language that makes clear that this trial isn't just about the question of the former president's culpability.
Trump, who’s accused Manhattan’s first Black district attorney of being “racist” against him, has called Bragg “lazy” and repeated false claims that he has refused to prosecute violent crime.
Both of these insults — alleged laziness and indifference to violence — have commonly been deployed by racists throughout U.S. history to malign Black people.
Trump’s oft-repeated suggestion that he can’t get a fair trial in New York City also aligns with claims he’s made about corruption and criminality in other areas with large Black populations, including Fulton County, Georgia, where he has lobbed his share of racist attacks at District Attorney Fani Willis.
Trump and the MAGA movement’s behavior in the lead-up to his New York trial lends credence to my colleague Zeeshan Aleem’s argument from last year, that Republicans have framed Trump’s New York indictment as an attack on white America.
To me, that appears to be the gist of Fox News host Jesse Watters’ claim Tuesday that “the jury pool is basically like the O.J. [Simpson] jury pool. You’re gonna have people trying to wiggle into that jury and send a message.” Watters, of course, is referencing the infamous murder trial that was consumed by questions about race and racism, in which some have argued that the majority-Black jury acquitted Simpson, not because they thought he was innocent, but to send a message about anti-Black racism in the Los Angeles Police Department.
And then you have folks like Rudy Giuliani overtly racializing the trial. In a screed posted on X on Tuesday, he attacked Judge Juan Merchan, who emigrated to the United States from Colombia as a child, for allegedly not upholding “the tradition of Anglo-American jurists.” Friends, my racist radar started sounding alarms when I read that.
To be clear: Trump’s indictment is very obviously not an actual attack on white America. Just take a look at the potential witness list: All of the people who are testifying against Trump in this case are white, too. But Trump and his allies have portrayed the trial like an attack on white people — or, if you scratch the surface, on what they expect white people’s stature in American society to be. If you follow this logic to its root, it's the very concept of Black and brown civic participation — as jurors, district attorneys and even judges — that's being called into question.
All of this is to be expected from the movement that's stoked lies about rampant voter fraud occurring in districts with large Black populations. It's the same folks who suggested in 2016 that a judge's Mexican heritage should preclude him from presiding over a Trump case. But the behavior we're seeing now shouldn't be ignored, either. As Trump’s trial unfolds in New York — and whenever it begins in Fulton County — we can’t forget that in the MAGA imagination, these are being portrayed as zero-sum race wars. And the seamless administration of justice, in both cases, would do a world of good in affirming Black and brown folks as equal citizens of the United States.