Donald Trump spokeswoman Karoline Leavitt took to X on Tuesday night, saying she was enraged that a Washington Post reporter would ask her to comment on an alleged hate crime two days after the election.
In the incident in question, Dawn Hines, who is Black, found "I hate n-----s sorry not sorry" spray-painted on her fence — which prompted an outpouring of support and solidarity from the mostly-Black community in Lawnside, located in southern New Jersey near Philadelphia. The reporter, Emmanuel Felton, reached out to Leavitt for comment about his article on the incident.
"What happened in Lawnside was part of a wave of racial incidents that occurred in the days following Trump's reelection," wrote Felton. "Around the same time that Hines's fence was sprayed, Black people across the country were receiving text messages that said they'd been 'selected to pick cotton at the nearest plantation.' And at the same time that Lawnside residents came together to discuss the graffiti on Hines's fence, a group of self-identified neo-Nazis marched and shouted the same slur in Columbus, Ohio. While none of these events can be traced directly back to Trump, experts say that his rhetoric has been tied to an increase in hate crimes across the nation."
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Hate crime rates have doubled since Trump first ran for president a decade ago.
But Leavitt, who has previously defended the racist joke about Puerto Rico at Trump's Madison Square Garden rally and claimed Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz's legislation on tampon access was a "threat to society," took umbrage over the assertion.
"I just received one of the most absurd emails EVER from the Washington Post," she wrote. "This 'reporter' is doing gymnastics to try and sow division and blame President Trump for something that he admits in his email has no trace to him whatsoever; This is exactly why NOBODY trusts the Fake News Media; Jeff Bezos warned his staff before the election, and they’re still not listening to him!"
The Bezos remark alludes to the Amazon billionaire thwarting the Washington Post editorial board's intention to endorse Vice President Kamala Harris. Bezos argued it would taint public trust in the paper's straight news reporting, though political endorsements are standard practice for the editorial divisions of many newsrooms.