CNN’s Brianna Keilar Takes a Deep Dive on One of Trump’s Most ‘Tried-and-True Methods – The Racist Attack’

CNN’s Brianna Keilar broke down all the ways Donald Trump has used racist tropes to spur on his base, now that he appears to be going after GOP presidential hopeful Nikki Haley (R-SC).

“Nikki Haley has been closing the polling gap with former President Trump in New Hampshire, just six days before the primary there, and now he is training his rhetorical sites on her, using one of his tried-and-true methods — the racist attack,” Keilar said.

Keilar referenced a Truth Social post in which Trump called Haley, “Nikki Nimrada Haley,” [sic, Nimarata Nikki Haley] purposely highlighting her Indian ancestry.

“Trump calling Haley by her full given name, ‘Nimarata,’ misspelling it significantly, by the way. It’s not inherently racist to call someone by their own name, true. But there’s no other reason for Trump to highlight her South Asian ethnicity than to hope that voters will see it as ‘different,’ and some of them even might see it as ‘inferior,’ and that is the point. Just as Trump emphasizes former President Barack Obama’s Arabic middle name, Hussein, which is commonly used in the Muslim world, although Obama himself is not a Muslim.”

Keilar recounted Trump’s long history of racist rhetoric and actions, from the 1970s when the DOJ pegged the family business for racially discriminating against tenants, to the 1980s, when Trump called for the death penalty for the “Central Park Five,” Black teenagers who were exonerated of a brutal gang rape.

“Back to present day, the latest attack using Nikki Haley’s name follows his recent efforts to popularize a conspiracy theory that she might not be eligible to be president because her parents weren’t citizens when she was born. Trump is using an insidious rubric we have seen before, one that he honed as the ‘birther in chief,’ questioning whether former President Obama was born in Kenya instead of Hawaii.”

Keilar then fact-checked Trump’s latest “birther conspiracy theory”:

Nikki Haley is a natural-born citizen. She’s eligible to be president, says the Constitution. But that’s not really what this boils down to. It boils down to this: Even as Haley talks publicly about her heritage, Trump is trying to weaponize it, reminding voters that her family hasn’t been in the U.S. all that long compared to theirs. That her family is not like theirs, and she is not like them, and is that really who they want representing them in the White House? And as long as that gets through, trump’s mission is accomplished.

Watch the clip above via CNN.

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