Trump tirade on ‘racist’ prosecutors echoes other racist tropes

Looking out at a sea of faces at a Texas fairground, most of them white, former President Trump seethed about his legal troubles and blamed them on malicious prosecutors. That’s among the fears stoking the white supremacy movement, the so-called “white replacement theory” that people of color will supplant white people in the country’s power dynamics and social structure. “It intensifies that discourse and makes it explicitly racial,” said Casey Kelly, a communications professor at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln who for years has pored over transcripts of Trump’s speeches. And now Trump is using the investigations against him — and the prosecutors behind them — as “evidence of a larger systemic pattern that white people don’t have a place in the future of America and he’s the only one that can fight on their behalf,” Kelly said. Willis — the Georgia prosecutor who asked a judge to impanel a special grand jury to help probe possible “criminal disruptions” by Trump and his allies during the 2020 presidential election and its aftermath — told the Atlanta Journal-Constitution that threats and racist slurs against her have increased since Trump’s rally in Texas.