The New Yorker’s Jeffery Toobin has a short memory. It’s like he approaches each day as if it were his first.
This all starts with Omarosa Manigault Newman. She has written an unflattering memoir about her brief stint in the White House, which has President Trump seething.
“Wacky Omarosa, who got fired 3 times on the Apprentice, now got fired for the last time. She never made it, never will. She begged me for a job, tears in her eyes, I said Ok. People in the White House hated her,” the president tweeted this week. “She was vicious, but not smart. I would rarely see her but heard really bad things.”
He added, “When you give a crazed, crying lowlife a break, and give her a job at the White House, I guess it just didn’t work out. Good work by General Kelly for quickly firing that dog!”
“While I know it’s ‘not presidential’ to take on a lowlife like Omarosa, and while I would rather not be doing so, this is a modern day form of communication and I know the Fake News Media will be working overtime to make even Wacky Omarosa look legitimate as possible,” he added.
In all this, Toobin smelled racism.
“Who does the president attack on Twitter constantly? African-Americans,” he said Tuesday during an appearance on CNN. “Whether it’s the UCLA basketball team, whether it’s the NFL football players, whether it’s our colleague Don Lemon, LeBron James. It’s always black people that he’s attacking. Not exclusively, but to a disproportionate extent, he’s attacking black people.”
It’s a “classic racist accusation” to question the intelligence of African-Americans, he claimed.
“We sometimes forget, the entire basis for Donald Trump’s political career is his racist attack on Barack Obama for not being born in the United States,” Toobin said. “That’s how he became a public political figure. The tweet today calling Omarosa is a dog is just part of that.”
[CNN’s John Berman: ‘Compelling case’ that Trump calling Omarosa a ‘dog’ was motivated by race]
These would be great points were it not for the fact that Trump calls everyone he dislikes an idiot. He’s also fond of referring to people as dogs (see my Washington Examiner colleague Emily Jashinsky for more on this).
It doesn’t matter if you’re white, brown, black or whatever. If you’re on Trump’s bad side, you’re an idiot and a dog. He’ll tell you as much in public with little to no provocation.
On Feb. 19, 2013, for example, he called comedian Bill Maher an “idiot.”
On Oct. 18, 2013, Trump called former New York magazine Senior Editor Dan Amira an “idiot.”
On Dec. 1, 2015, he called Washington Post columnist Jennifer Rubin a “real dummy.”
On Dec. 18, 2015, Trump called former Republican Florida Gov. Jeb Bush “dumb.”
On July 1, 2017, he called MSNBC host Mika Brzezinski “dumb as a rock.”
On June 13, 2018, he called actor Robert De Niro a “very low IQ individual.”
Get the picture?
Not everything is a racist dog whistle. Sometimes, people just think an idiot is just an idiot. Of all people, you think Toobin would recognize one by now.
(h/t Rob Province)
