New York Times reporter Maggie Haberman said on Monday that President Donald Trump's widely criticized praise of the Confederate flag and his attack on Black NASCAR driver Bubba Wallace were aimed squarely at rallying his white supporters.
In commenting on the president's Monday morning tweet, in which he criticized NASCAR for banning the Confederate flag from cars and also mischaracterized the controversy surrounding what appeared to be a noose found in Wallace's garage, Haberman said that Trump was engaging in "an overt display aimed at his white base of supporters, after a weekend during which he stuck to the script at his official events and broadly described 'history.'"
Many of Trump's defenders over the weekend emphasized that the president's speech at Mount Rushmore was about defending American history, with no specific messages about defending the Confederacy.
Trump blew that all up on Monday, however, when he explicitly said that NASCAR should not have barred its drivers from putting pro-Confederacy displays on their vehicles.
