CNN’s Erin Burnett called out President Donald Trump’s history of deploying the loaded term “infest” as a dogwhistle to stoke racism and nativism and said his re-election campaign’s embrace of such divisive rhetoric to energize its white supporters was a “deeply ugly admission.”
On her show Out Front, Burnett noted that the president’s recent Tweets blasting Democratic Congressman Elijah Cummings’ Baltimore district as “disgusting rodent and rat infested mess” — and then doubling down on it — was part of a larger pattern of using that kind of prejudicial language. She then proceeded to show a number of previous Tweets where Trump wielded “infest” like a rhetorical cudgel to attack minorities.
“Infest is a loaded word throughout history,” Burnett noted, before highlighting a series of Tweets from earlier in July in which Trump also used the word to attack Congresswomen Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, Rashida Tlaib, Ayanna Pressley, and Ilhan Omar. “And ‘infest’ is a word the president often uses when it comes to black and brown people, just the other day telling four minority congresswomen to ‘go back’ to the crime-infested countries they came from.”
Cummings, Burnett pointed out, chairs the House Oversight Committee, which is conducting numerous investigations of the Trump administration, making him another high-profile target for the president. And she also noted that, rather than try to walk back Trump’
“Don’t take my comment as a guess,” Burnett said. “The Washington Post reports that Trump’s advisers concluded that attacks like these are ‘good for the president among his political base, resonating strongly with the white working-class voters he needs to win reelection in 2020.’ They said it. They think slamming minorities, black congressmen, will resonate with Trump’s white voters. That is a deeply ugly admission.”
Watch the video above, via CNN.