CNN anchor Don Lemon said Friday on “CNN This Morning” that former President Donald Trump’s “racist” attacks on Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg and New York Attorney General Letitia James were “really disturbing.”
Partial transcript as follows:
LEMON: This is really disturbing to me because he’s been doing this for a while, and I think we can’t talk enough about it, where he’s been calling these prosecutors who happen to be African-American, saying that they’re racist. He called Alvin Bragg a Soros-backed animal. He’s turning to his old tricks here of, you know, being racist or racist-adjacent, using that type of language for people.
ABBY PHILLIP: Yeah. And as someone who’s, I covered Trump for years, if you go back and you read his rhetoric, I mean, this goes actually all the way back to the eighties. Trump has a very long history of calling Black people racist.
LEMON: Or dumb.
PHILLIP: Or dumb or using, you know, talking about Baltimore as being, you know, filthy, rat infested. The same thing with Congressman John Lewis district in the Atlanta suburbs. So he has a long history of that. These are I don’t know if we can even call them codes at this point, because I think that it’s pretty transparent. But they are signals to his base, who are much more prone to see Black people in positions of power, in particular in a racial lens, even though what the D.A. is doing at this moment actually has absolutely nothing to do with race. I think we’ve got to just stick with the facts here, wait for them to unfold and not get distracted by what Trump is trying to do, which is to rile up his his base from a political perspective on this issue.
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