Highlighting crime in major American cities can be a form of coded racist language, according to MSNBC’s Chris Matthews.
His remarks came this week as he previewed GOP nominee Donald Trump’s acceptance speech at the Republican National Convention in Cleveland.
“There’s going to be a lot about the usual Republican theme of law and order going back to 1968. You’re going to see a lot about the big cities,” Matthews predicted. “There’s going to be an ethnic aspect to this, a racial aspect to it. They — Trump in his speech talks about the crime rate in Washington, D.C. He talks about the crime rate in Baltimore.”
“Those are cities of large minority populations, we all know, and it’s going to carry that kind of flavor. He talks very much about that theme. And I think the idea of running on law and order at a time we’re really being challenged by terrorism is a very Republican approach to it,” he added.
Trump’s planned address for the fourth and final evening of the GOP convention was leaked Thursday afternoon hours before he was set to deliver it. Major newsrooms, including the Washington Post and Politico, immediately published the speech, and it was soon picked apart by reporters and pundits.
Later Thursday evening, as Trump’s big moment drew closer, Matthews theorized about the real meaning of Trump mentioning major metropolitan areas.
“If you look over the speech drafts or text, what you see is a melding together of concern about terrorism, which puts us all in the same boat. All Americans don’t like terrorism,” he said.
“All Americans are fearful of it. But when you get back to the angle, the edge, it’s about big cities with large minority populations. You go back to that old thing of bashing Washington, D.C., the old Marion Barry days, bashing Baltimore and Chicago, those city names evoke minorities,” he added.
MSNBC’s Chuck Todd responded, “There is — you wonder — there’s some coded language.”
