President Trump has done some very good things recently.
He pardoned the late African-American heavyweight boxing champion Jack Johnson, who was convicted in 1913 by an all-white jury of taking his then-girlfriend across state lines.
Trump also commuted the sentence of Alice Marie Johnson, an African-American woman who was serving life in prison for a first-time nonviolent drug offense. The 63-year-old grandmother had already served 21 years behind bars.
[Also read: Trump’s clemency list has 3,000 names, NFL players invited to add more]
Trump’s decisions here are indisputably good things. The president righted a wrong, and he gave a woman her life back.
For New Yorker columnist and senior CNN legal analyst Jeffrey Toobin, however, the president’s actions are really part of a larger, more cynical strategy. To wit, the legal pundit believes Trump’s recent pardons and commutations are all “theater,” and what that the president really wants, deep down, is to pick as many fights as possible with African-Americans.
“Let’s also remember that President [Barack] Obama … had a process for nonviolent drug offenders to submit applications for commutations and pardons, and he granted more than 1,000 commutations and pardons,” Toobin complained not long after the White House announced Johnson’s commutation. “There wasn’t this great theater, there were no celebrities involved, but that is how you impact a lot of lives.”
The talking head added, “This is yet another example — by fighting with the NFL players and the UCLA basketball players, by his comments in Charlotteville, President Trump gets to fight with black people. Which he thinks is a great advantage, politically.”
This is a real take that a real, live person aired on a cable news network. I’m not making any of this up.
“This is not an olive branch. This is more opportunity to define himself,” Toobin said. “There is pretend political strategy and then there is actually what is going on in the real world.”
He added, “In the real world, this is a president who has used fighting with black people as a chance for political advancement. Let’s never forget that this is a man who made his political career by lying about the birthplace of the country’s first African-American president.”
I’ve said it before, and I’ll say it again: Trump’s superpower is his ability to expose his critics as insane people. Toobin is merely the latest in a long line of anti-Trump media personalities who don’t seem to realize just how crazy they sound.
For the good of general discourse, and for his own sake, Toobin should stick to legal analysis. Leave the groundless speculation to the professionals like Alex Jones.
Full disclosure: This author is a paid contributor with CNN/HLN.
