'Trump, Chauvin and Amy Cooper are in the same slime': Pulitzer Prize winner

Surveying the past week of racially-charged incidents -- one of which led to a former police officer being arrested for killing a Black man in Minneapolis -- and other ugliness from the week, Pulitzer Prize winner Colbert King wrote that the police officer, a New York woman who lied to police that a Black man threatened her and Donald Trump who spent the week sliming a critic with a false murder allegation are all cut from the same cloth.

Noting the still-unfolding story of white ex-police officer named Derek Chauvin who has been taken into custody over the death of 46-year-old George Floyd, the case of New Yorker Amy Cooper who falsely accused a Black birdwatcher of threatening her and the president of the United States who also levied false allegations, King said their actions are part of "the sickening reality" in the U.S.

"A white cop in Minneapolis, a white woman in Central Park, a president in the nation’s capital: joined together in their display of malice," he wrote before detailing the cases of Chauvin, Cooper and the president who has been smearing MSNBC host Joe Scarborough with Twitter accusations of murder.

"Trump, Chauvin and Amy Cooper are in the same slime," he explained. "Yes, the Twin Cities situation is the latest in a line of videos showing unarmed black men being killed in police encounters. And yes, the Central Park scene was different, a white woman making a false accusation against an innocent black man — a vicious and vintage-American pursuit that for centuries has endangered, imprisoned and destroyed black men."

"Yes, too, both are distinct from Trump’s practice of using the presidential bully pulpit to blatantly lie, smear and eke out all sorts of damage — just for his personal benefit," he added. "But the brutal cop, devilish dog-walker and despicable president share one condition: They carried out brutish acts apparently unencumbered by the morals that restrain decent, civilized people. To remind: Minneapolis’s paroxysms of rage were induced by the sight of an unarmed black man dying while a white cop kneeled on his neck."

Turning to Trump he wrote, "H.L. Mencken presciently saw this day coming when he wrote in Baltimore’s Evening Sun on July 26, 1920, 'On some great and glorious day, the plain folks of the land will reach their heart’s desire at last, and the White House will be adorned by a downright moron,'" before lamenting: " America, we reap what we sow."

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