As the criminal case against former President Donald Trump's alleged $130,000 hush payment to Stormy Daniels unfolds in New York, the accused has resorted to white supremacist intimidation tactics he perfected in the 1980s to try to intimidate Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg, wrote Symone D. Sanders for MSNBC on Tuesday.
" Trump has called Bragg an animal, and he warned of 'death and destruction' from his supporters if he was indicted on charges related to the hush money payment to adult film actress Stormy Daniels," wrote Sanders. "He posted a now-deleted image of himself holding a baseball bat positioned next to a picture of Bragg’s head.
"The racist and escalatory rhetoric Trump is using to speak about Bragg isn’t just business as usual, nor mere political rhetoric. It is serious. Bragg has reportedly received at least one death threat (among hundreds of other threats) in the form of a package that was mailed to his office. The package contained a note that said 'Alvin — I’ll kill you.'"
While this is not normal rhetoric, Sanders wrote, it is also not new. Trump is used to these kinds of racist intimidation tactics, and he used them over thirty years ago to solidify the conviction of the Exonerated Five, the Black men wrongly convicted of the brutal rape of a Central Park jogger.
Trump famously took out front-page ads demanding the return of the death penalty, timed at a moment when the city was on edge over the case.
"After [Yusef] Salaam, Kevin Richardson, Antron McCray, Raymond Santana and Korey Wise were convicted as teens, they spent several years behind bars for a crime they didn’t commit. It wasn’t until 2002 that the five men were exonerated and the city settled a lawsuit with them after the real perpetrator came forward," noted Sanders. Salaam, recalling the ad Trump took out in 1989, said, "I knew that this famous man was calling for us to die."
To this day, Trump has never apologized or admitted he was wrong, and continues to argue they deserved it, even after forensic evidence exonerated them.
"As we await news of Trump’s arraignment Tuesday, expecting at least one rally in his support and bracing ourselves for even more rhetoric Tuesday evening in a post-arraignment speech he has announced, it’s clear Trump’s modus operandi hasn’t changed much since the late ’80s, when he helped solidify a wrongful conviction for Salaam and his peers," wrote Trump. "In the coming weeks, perhaps months, we’ll see whether or not some form of justice catches up with him."
In a twist of irony, Trump is to be arraigned in the same Manhattan courthouse those men went through.
