CNN political commentator Alyssa Farah served as former President Donald Trump’s White House Director of Strategic Communications has accused him of using a racial “bullhorn” with his rant against “riggers” following his indictment this week via Media Ite.
Trump was slapped with 13 charges in Georgia over his attempts to overturn the results of the 2020 election and he protested on Truth Social, “There will be a complete EXONERATION! They never went after those that Rigged the Election. They only went after those that fought to find the RIGGERS!”
On CNN’s The Lead, Wednesday, host Jake Tapper asked Farah for her thoughts on former White House aide Keith Boykin’s claim “that the use of the word ‘rigger’ is not unintentional.”
“With Trump, you don’t need to look for a dogwhistle – it’s a bullhorn when it comes to race, and I do think that’s deliberate,” Farah responded:
“We’ve seen the, I mean, slanderous attacks that he’s put out against Fani Willis. You know, alleging things I won’t even repeat, so he’s not really hiding that he’s going to lean into that element and this is, you know, taking place just outside of Atlanta. When you saw the courtroom, it was a lot of Black men and women who were serving in that courtroom. The fact that he’s introducing race into this prosecution surprises me, it’s disgusting, it’s textbook Donald Trump, but it comes as no surprise.”
Boykin accused Trump of racism on Tuesday following his “riggers” remark and argued that the former president’s choice of words was “not an accident after spending days making racist attacks against Fani Willis, the Black woman leading the prosecution against him in Atlanta.”
The Guardian‘s Ed Pilkington also accused Trump of making “a thinly veiled play on the N-word” with his “riggers” comment in an article on Wednesday.
