“I knew that this famous man was calling for us to die.”
Those were the words of Yusef Salaam from a 2016 interview with The Guardian, speaking about an advertisement that a then up-and-coming media mogul named Donald Trump took out in four newspapers across New York City in 1989 targeting Salaam and four other Black and Latino teenagers who would be wrongly convicted of raping a white female jogger in New York City.
The former president has a pattern and a playbook. He is back at it again, playing up racist tropes to further his own public agenda.
On Tuesday, former President Trump is scheduled to be arraigned in New York City in the same courthouse where the Exonerated Five (formerly referred to as the Central Park Five) were wrongly convicted.
That’s not the only theme that has come back into play during the current Trump investigations and the recent indictment by Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg. The former president has a pattern and a playbook. He is back at it again, playing up racist tropes to further his own public agenda. This time, he’s attacking Bragg, who is the first Black person to serve as the Manhattan district attorney, who convened the grand jury that voted to indict Trump.
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. 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.”
After Salaam, Kevin Richardson, Antron McCray, Raymond Santana and Korey Wise were…
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