Former President Donald Trump called the Black prosecutors leading investigations against Trump racist during a Saturday night rally in Texas, encouraging his supporters to stage protests in the prosecutors’ home cities.
At the rally, Trump denounced Black prosecutors from Georgia, New York and Washington, D.C., independently investigating Trump as “radical, vicious, racist.”
The referenced prosecutors are Fulton County (Ga.) District Attorney Fani Willis, New York Attorney General Letitia James and Washington, D.C., Attorney General Karl Racine.
Trump continued that should any investigators “do anything wrong or illegal,” he hopes to see “the biggest protests we have ever had in Washington, D.C., in New York, in Atlanta and elsewhere.”
Trump voiced support for a more infamous protest at another point in the rally, suggesting that he would consider issuing pardons to protesters charged for their role in the deadly January 6, 2021 attack on the Capitol if he is elected president in 2024.
Trump initially lightly reprimanded his supporters who stormed the Capitol in support of Trump’s false claims of voter fraud in the 2020 election, but has since softened his stance on the events, falsely claiming it was an “unarmed protest.” Willis, the district attorney of Atlanta’s home county, was recently approved to seat a special grand jury as part of her investigation into whether to charge Trump tied to his repeated suggestion of election fraud in Georgia. James is investigating Trump and his family for “fraudulent business practices,” and filed a motion this week to dismiss Trump’s lawsuit seeking to block New York’s investigation from proceeding. Racine sued Trump’s 2017 inaugural committee for fraud last January, and a spokesman for Racine said in November that the suit will move to trial.
Trump has a history of calling his Black political opponents racist. In 2019, Trump called former Rep. Elijah Cummings (D-Md.) “racist” in a tweet, responding to pushback from Trump calling Cummings’ majority-Black district “disgusting, rat and rodent infested.” Trump provided no explanation for why he thought Cummings was racist.