CNN anchor John Berman said there is reason to believe President Trump’s recent insults on Twitter about former White House aide Omarosa Manigault Newman are motivated by race, even while Manigault Newman herself is on a book tour calling Trump a racist.
[Exclusive: Trump campaign seeks ‘millions’ against Omarosa for violating nondisclosure]
In an interview Tuesday with Rep. Frederica Wilson, D.-Fla., who is black and who Trump has also clashed with in the past, Berman asked if she saw a “racial tinge” in Trump repeatedly calling Manigault Newman “wacky.”
“Mr. Trump is a white supremacist,” Wilson said. “He has surrounded himself with white supremacists and everything that comes out of that White House is racist. So what he says is racist.”
Trump praised in a tweet earlier that morning the “good work” done by his chief of staff John Kelly “for quickly firing that dog” Manigault Newman in December last year.
Berman acknowledged that Trump has called other “white people and men” names like “wacky” — Trump has in the past used the word to describe Glenn Beck and the New York Times columnist Maureen Dowd — but still let Wilson say unchallenged that Trump’s insults fall “all on one side” in terms of his targets’ race.
Berman continued, “I mean, using the word ‘dog’ we could argue it simply isn’t presidential, and I think you can make a compelling case that when you use it toward an African-American woman, it means something different.”
