Source: Drew Angerer / Getty
OK, at this point it has become abundantly clear that the GOP has dedicated itself to playing around in Black people’s faces—and Republicans have been doing it in overdrive ever since their MAGA messiah was found guilty of committing 34 crimes. On Monday, U.S. Rep. Dan Bishop (R-N.C.) took his pasty, caucasity-saturated, white behind to The Peter Kaliner Show on Charlotte radio station WBT so he could compare the “persecution” of Donald Trump to the persecution of Black people in Alabama during Jim Crow.
But before we get into that part, let’s start with Bishop’s suggestion that Trump is the only person in New York history to be charged with what he was charged with. This is what he asserted:
“The problem here is that politics should never drive the use and application of the criminal justice infrastructure, ever,” said Bishop, who is currently running for Attorney General of North Carolina. “And unless you can say that others are being prosecuted for similar offenses, similar circumstances, with the same laws, and susceptible to the same punishments, it is a concept known as selective or vindictive prosecution. It’s well known to the law, it is a violation of the Constitution, and it cannot stand.”
Source: Fair use photo / Fair use photo
Last year, Just Security posted a 24-page survey detailing dozens of New York prosecutions over the last decade for falsifying business records in the first degree, which was the top charge leveled against Trump. According to NBC New York, “Records from the New York Division of Criminal Justice Services show 10 years ago, 101 people were arrested in New York City in cases where the top charge was falsification of business records.”
In 2022, only 39 people faced that top charge, but the fact that none of those people were named Donald Trump still indicates he wasn’t given a custom-made charge that only he could catch. Now, to be fair, prosecutions for falsifying business records did increase by a lot when Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg took office, but that doesn’t help Republicans’ “only Trump” narrative since that increase also didn’t include defendants named Donald Trump.
From NBC:
In Bragg’s first 15 months as DA, his team filed 166 felony counts for falsifying business records against 34 people or companies. Under former District Attorney Cy Vance, it took three years – between 2019 and 2021 – to charge about the same number of business record felonies.
In his news conference after Donald Trump was arraigned, Bragg underscored the importance of enforcing the law related to the integrity of business records.
“This charge can be said is the bread and butter of our white collar work,” Bragg said. “True and accurate business records are important everywhere. They are all the more important in Manhattan.”
So, when Bishop challenged the DA’s office to “say that others are being prosecuted for similar offenses, similar circumstances, with the same laws,” he clearly didn’t bother doing the bare minimum research it would have taken to see that New Yorkers, in fact, have been prosecuted for such offenses under the same rule of law, but that’s not how MAGA Republicans operate—they just routinely hurl lies at the wall and hope some of them stick.
Now, back to the part where Bishop pretends Trump is being treated like America’s No. 1 lynching target in the segregated South of the ’50s.
“When I say it’s rigged, it’s not just they don’t go into a fair fight, they go into a place where they know the fight is unfair,” Bishop said. “It’s as bad as it was in Alabama in 1950—if a person happened to be Black—in order to get justice. And, that’s what they did in New York. So, it’s fundamentally rigged, and the people who attack me for saying so can attack all they want.”
Source: CARL COURT/AFP/Getty Images / Getty
Bishop obviously knew he was going to get dragged across the internet like Alabamans used to drag Black people from the rear bumpers of their pickup trucks for suggesting that Trump has faced anything comparable to anti-Black oppression in the ’50s (or in 2024, for that matter), which is why he expected folks to “attack” him, which they certainly did.
On a side note, Bishop’s statement isn’t terribly surprising considering this is the same guy who, on Memorial Day, compared the courage of Republicans who passed an anti-trans bathroom bill in 2016 to “soldiers [that] have died in service of this country.”
Calm down, bro. You blocked trans people from using the restroom of their choice, that’s hardly a fight for “freedom and rights.”
Look, there is zero reason to entertain Bishop’s white nonsense by fact-checking a thing that is obviously absurd. No one should feel compelled to prove that a rich white man in New York being prosecuted and found guilty of white-collar crimes is being treated the same as Black people in the South who were legally barred from voting, entering “whites only” establishments, confined to the backs of buses, and subjected to unspeakable violent crimes committed by white people who knew they would most likely escape justice. We don’t need to provide research to show Trump is much more comparable to Bull Connor than he is Emmet Till.
Instead, let’s just talk about how Republicans—who have dedicated themselves to ignoring or denying the existence of systemic racism while attacking any effort to correct it, including DEI, affirmative action, Black Lives Matter, critical race theory and the ubiquitous thing they call “wokeness”—are suddenly trying to connect with the Black collective by relating Trump’s legal woes to our struggle.
The day before Bishop made his comment, Eric Trump was on Fox News claiming Black people are “swinging over to Donald Trump in spades” because they realize that the system’s coming down, that he’s the victim, he’s the victim that oftentimes some of their communities were,” which was essentially an echo of his father previously declaring that “Black people like me because they have been hurt so badly and discriminated against, and they actually viewed me as I’m being discriminated against.” This from the guy who spearheaded the GOP’s attack on CRT, advocated for the whitewashing of Black history, constantly attacked BLM, issued an executive order banning diversity training in the workplace during his presidency and is now promising to end all DEI programs across America if he’s elected again.
So, which is it, Republicans? Is Trump being treated as unfairly as Black people are under systemic racism in America, or does said systemic racism not exist? You can’t have it both ways unless you’re just a bunch of pathologically lying, racist, history-revising hypocrites who are only concerned with the state of Black America when it’s time to use us as political pawns.
Oh, wait…
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