The summer of 2019, President Donald Trump spent so much time sending racist tweets; it is coming close to rivaling his time on the golf course.
According to New York Intelligencer columnist Jonathan Chait Sunday's attacks on Rep. Elijah Cummings (D-MD) and the city of Baltimore are just the latest in a long series of racist Twitter battles the president has started.
There's a specific word that Trump likes to use when talking about representatives of color and the districts they have been elected from: "infested."
It's a word that harkens back to the era where people of color were referred to (and treated like) vermin.
CNN anchor Victor Blackwell visibly showed how the dehumanizing language can cause so much pain.
"When he tweets about infestation, it's about black and brown people," Blackwell explained. He recalled that it happened before when Trump talked about migrants in relation to gang violence, inner-city crime, and the four congresswomen of color. "Infested" is a racist dog whistle in Trump's lexicon.
As we reach the end of July, Trump has spent the last two weekends in a row attacking people of color.
"The best explanations for Trump's actions are often the stupidest ones," Chait wrote. "Trump has decided the answer to "how I spent my summer vacation" will be sending racist tweets, primarily because that was the thing that he felt like doing at those moments, contradicting the pleas of most of his fellow Republicans."
Chait called the tweets the greatest representation of the way Trump communicates.
"For one thing, they convey the beliefs that have undergirded his career," he explained.
Trump's professional life began with his father's housing discrimination, which excluded people of color. It was not only the senior Trump's business model, but the younger Trump also carried it forward.
"He did not merely engage in periodic acts of discrimination, but insistently violated federal law and went to war with the Department of Justice rather than amend his ways," Chait wrote. "Trump's association of African-Americans with crime and filth, and the assumption they must be cordoned off from other Americans is a conviction so deep it cannot be uprooted."
But now Trump has brought these "values" to the White House.
"One of the many oddities of his term in office is that he never observed the traditional break between campaigning and governing, and as a result never adopted even the pose of representing the entire country," Chait explained.
The result has been a non-stop war against his political enemies in an endless campaign cycle. It puts Trump in the position of trashing parts of the country and groups of people he was elected to represent.
American presidents simply do not call American cities filthy and dangerous," Chait closed. "George W. Bush may not have enjoyed much support in places like Baltimore, but he wouldn't go around calling Democratic neighborhoods disgusting hellholes. It does not occur to Trump that the patriotic requirements of his office require representing the whole of it."
