Donald Trump led up to Thanksgiving with what may have been his Donald Trumpiest weekend in quite some time. According to Trump, a Black Lives Matter protester who was assaulted by a group of Trump’s supporters at a Saturday campaign event basically had it coming (“maybe he should have been roughed up”), and then there was this charming and outlandishly inaccurate racist tweet:
Judd Legum breaks it down with actual FBI data rather than the bogus “Crime Statistics Bureau — San Francisco”:
Trump’s graphic states that 81% of whites who are murdered are murdered by blacks. This is false. The actual data shows that 14% of white murder victims are murdered by a black person. (In 2013, it was 13.6%.)
The percentage of blacks murdered by other blacks (89.9%) is similar to the percentage of whites murdered by other whites (82.3%). Trump’s graphic falsely states that 97% of blacks are killed by other blacks but just 16% of whites are killed by other whites.
You’d have to work to get much more wrong than that. But I guess for a committed racist, coming up with fake racist statistics is pleasure, not work. And for Trump, retweeting doesn’t take much thought at all—if it appeals to his id, up it goes.