No, what really peeved Trump about the President’s address this past weekend was the unsettling memory of that White House Correspondence Dinner, and the fact that the President was, once again, drawing laughter at his expense by saying this:
You may have heard Hillary’s opponent in this election say that there’s never been a worse time to be a black person. I mean, he missed that whole civics lesson about slavery and Jim Crow and (applause) -- but we've got a museum for him to visit (applause). So he can tune in. We will educate him (applause).
This was the passage, and the laughter it produced, which seared Trump. His eventual response would remind me of Hillary Clinton’s crystallizing line:
“A man you can bait with a tweet is not a man we can trust with nuclear weapons.”
It will always be a line associated with Trump, who would later change one of his speeches due to anger over a tweet by the president of Mexico, regarding his country’s rejection of building Trump’s ridiculous wall:
Mr. Trump was peeved that Mr. Peña Nieto had gone public with the fact that the Mexican president had broken what Mr. Trump considered a deal to keep the question of paying for the wall off the table at their initial meeting. So Mr. Trump hurriedly inserted a new sentence in his immigration speech, and he soon boomed out from the podium his traditional declaration that the wall would be paid for by Mexico—adding, “They don’t know it yet but they’re going to pay for the wall.”
We have heard Donald Trump attempt to demean African American’s before, through provocative rhetoric where he characterized the lives of Black folk as being utterly worthless and suggestively irreparable, except, he suggests, under the auspices of his leadership.
He continued with this rhetoric after hearing the President’s address, but this time he would add something new to his speech. This time the Republican presidential candidate decided to reveal the depth of his jeering contempt for the history and integrity of African Americans by stating the following:
"Our African American communities are absolutely in the worse shape they've ever been in before," he said during a North Carolina rally. "Ever, ever, ever."
I am absolutely convinced that this emphasis of “Ever, ever, ever,” which had not been in his speeches prior to this past weekend, and clearly suggests even beyond slavery, was meant as a pathetic schoolyard rejoinder to Barack Obama as well as an affront to Black folk who continue to reject him in overwhelming numbers.
President Obama:
I mean, he missed that whole civics lesson about slavery and Jim Crow and (applause) -- but we've got a museum for him to visit (applause). So he can tune in. We will educate him (applause).
Yes, President Obama is alarmingly correct. This individual must never be the nation’s next president. And he never will.