The numbers can only tell us so much. As an example, of the roughly 75 men he’s tweeted negatively about by name, 62 are white. At least a dozen are not. But that doesn’t account for the three UCLA basketball players he criticized as not sufficiently grateful — “I should have left them in jail!” he tweeted — for his intervention following their arrest for shoplifting in China last year.
Nor does it include the estimated 200 NFL players — almost all of them black — who have knelt or in some other way protested racial inequality and police brutality during the National Anthem and been assailed by the President for it.
“Tell everybody,” the President said, in an apparent reference to other owners and league officials, “you can’t win this one. This one lifts me.”
By Trump’s definition, whether it’s the NFL or the investigations, and investigators, into Russian election interference, what “lifts” him tends to be synonymous with what lays others low — especially if it’s by his own hand, or tweeting digit(s).
In June 2017, Trump singled out then 50-year-old Mika Brzezinski, co-host of MSNBC’s “Morning Joe,” in a tweet disparaging her appearance and intellect:
Trump has also used the “low IQ” insult against actor Robert De Niro and, a few weeks later, Rep. Maxine Waters, a California Democrat who is black. More recently, he went after a pair of black men who have been critical, NBA star LeBron James and CNN anchor Don Lemon, saying that Lemon — whom he called “the dumbest man on television” — made James “look smart, which isn’t easy to do.”
During his time on the job, the President has singled out on Twitter at least two corporate CEOs: Ken Frazier of the pharmaceutical giant Merck, who is black, and Disney’s Bob Iger, who is white.
No individual, however, has popped up more in Trump’s feed than Hillary Clinton. And this count began after the 2016 election.
Trump has used the phrase “Crooked Hillary” more than 60 times since taking office.
Recent attacks on a pair of female figures, both with connections to men Trump has sought to discredit in relation to the Russia probe, have also brought attention to the way he addresses women — thinly cloaking his obvious contempt with loaded allusions to their appearances.
The President has twice described former FBI lawyer Lisa Page, who exchanged critical texts about Trump during the 2016 campaign with the since-fired FBI agent Peter Strzok, as “the lovely Lisa Page.” The first such tweet came at the beginning of the month and the second on August 11, the same day the President described Nellie Ohr, a former Fusion GPS contractor married to career Justice Department official Bruce Ohr, as his “beautiful wife.”
Or not.
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