Asked about Twitter’s suspension of the Senate majority leader’s campaign account Friday, President Trump went in a different direction.
“We’re looking at that right now. … But Hollywood is really terrible,” Trump told reporters. “You talk about racist. Hollywood is racist.”
Trump waited hours to clarify that he was apparently referring to “The Hunt,” a movie set to be released next month where “elites” hunt people for sport. (“Fox and Friends” ran a segment on the movie earlier in the day).
With his comments about Hollywood on Friday, Trump has now called at least 22 things and people “racist” over the past two decades, according to a tally by the Fix. You can watch examples of this in the video above.
Meanwhile, he has repeatedly admonished Democrats for labeling people as racist.
Trump defends himself from charges of racism in part by pointing to the black unemployment rate during his term.
The people and things Trump has called “racist” include:
- Rep. Elijah E. Cummings (D-Md.)
- The Rev. Al Sharpton
- “The Squad”
- Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.)
- Former president Barack Obama
- Former congressman Anthony Weiner
- House Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s (D-Calif.) statement accusing him of xenophobia
- Black reporter’s question about nationalism
- Jussie Smollett’s comments
- Jon Stewart
- Spike Lee
- Tavis Smiley
- Touré
- Bryant Gumbel
- Danny Zuker
- Hollywood
- Flier by the Maryland Democratic Party
- “Django Unchained”
- ABC’s “Black-ish”
- African nations
- Violent 2017 protests in Charlottesville
- David Duke
(After calling former KKK grand wizard David Duke a “racist” in 2000 and repudiating him in 2015, Trump told CNN in 2016 that he didn’t know anything about Duke.)
On Friday, Trump again admonished Democrats for their willingness to label things “racist.”
“They call anybody a racist when they run out of cards,” Trump said.
That’s similar to what his senior adviser Stephen Miller said less than three weeks prior.
“I think the term ‘racist’ … has become a label that is too often deployed by the left, Democrats in this country simply to try to silence and punish and suppress people they disagree with, speech that they don’t want to hear.”
The next morning, Trump called four freshman Democratic congresswomen “very racist.”