Trump campaign uses misleading posts, racist trope to attack Harris on crime

[mahatmakanejeeves]

Trump campaign uses misleading posts, racist trope to attack Harris on crime

The posts are part of a broader strategy widely viewed by scholars and other experts as exploiting stereotypes about crime and people of color

By Isaac Arnsdorf
August 2, 2024 at 5:00 a.m. EDT

Jaleel Stallings was just letting his dogs out and giving them breakfast a few days ago when he got a message from his lawyer telling him Donald Trump’s campaign was targeting him online. … “Here we go again,” he recalled thinking.

Four years ago, Stallings and a group of friends joined protests in Minneapolis over the police murder of George Floyd. A SWAT team in an unmarked van fired a nonlethal projectile that hit Stallings in the chest, and Stallings, an Army veteran, returned fire from a legally permitted pistol. Officers beat him, breaking his eye socket, and gave accounts of the encounter that were inconsistent with video recordings. He was eventually acquitted of attempted murder of an officer and received a $1.5 million civil rights settlement from the city, while the officer who beat him pleaded guilty to assault — but not before Stallings was vilified online.

Now, that stigma resurfaced in a post from an official Trump campaign account on the social media account X, which shows a mug shot of Stallings, who is Black, alongside a photo of Harris, who is Black and Indian American. The campaign accused Harris of raising “money to bail Stallings out of jail” because she promoted a bail fund that helped him. The post failed to mention that Stallings was acquitted.

{snip}

Aaron Schaffer contributed to this report.

By Isaac Arnsdorf
Isaac Arnsdorf is a national political reporter for The Washington Post who covers former president Donald Trump, the “Make America Great Again” political movement and the Republican Party. Twitter https://x.com/iarnsdorf

[Bernardo de La Paz]

1. Not the orange bigot's last resort. It is the strategy they prioritize.

It's really weird how they are pushing hard on their prejudiced base; pushing racist, sexist, authoritarian, and christian dominionist tropes. If we didn't know better, we might think their base was wobbly.

The weirdest part is that it does not help him gain any votes and peels some away from him. He can't win on his base alone. This strategy will hurt the Republicans down the ballots.