We can’t say we’re surprised. Infuriated? Yes. But not surprised. Just as with Trump’s recent slander of The Squad—he falsely charged that they hate America—his claim that the Rev. Al Sharpton “Hates Whites & Cops!” is deeply rooted in long-standing right-wing race-baiting. To briefly review, Trump’s targeting of Sharpton grew out of his broader racist barrage aimed at Rep. Elijah Cummings and the city of Baltimore he represents.
Cummings, you see, had the unmitigated gall (i.e., he was performing his constitutionally authorized duty as chair of the House Oversight Committee) to push for the issuing of subpoenas to follow up on evidence that Trump’s daughter and son-in-law, along with others in the White House, were, as Cummings stated, “using personal email accounts, text messaging services, and even encrypted applications for official business - and not preserving those records in compliance with federal law.” I wonder whether Trump will encourage the Russians to hack into Javanka’s accounts, like he did with Hillary’s.
Here’s how Sharpton comes into the picture: He tweeted out a video showing him traveling to Baltimore in support of Rep. Cummings. Before we go any further, yes, Sharpton did some truly awful things in the 1980s and 1990s, for which he deserved harsh criticism. However, for the past two decades or so he has steered clear of those kinds of inflammatory actions and become a truly positive force in the fight against racism and white supremacy. Back to this week: In response to Sharpton’s public embrace of Cummings, Trump let loose with the aforementioned race-baiting.
When Trump attacks Sharpton as someone who supposedly hates whites and hates cops, he knows exactly what he is doing. As The New York Times reported, “Mr. Trump has been irritated by Mr. Sharpton’s increasing criticism of him, believing that Mr. Sharpton has long since broken an informal truce, according to aides and people who have spoken to him. The president also believes that his attacks on Mr. Sharpton will appeal to his base.”
Furthermore, attacking Sharpton is, as the title of this post notes, straight out of the right-wing media playbook, and was a core tactic of Rush Limbaugh’s, in particular during the Obama presidency. As I explore in my new book, Limbaugh repeatedly attacked Sharpton, along with other leading black activists such as the Rev. Jesse Jackson, in terms very similar to those Trump used. The host also sought to tie the supposedly anti-white, anti-cop Sharpton to our country’s first African-American president. The goal was to exacerbate the level of racial resentment, fear, and anxiety toward Obama felt by white conservatives, i.e., his audience. Let me give you some examples.
First, the numbers: I found 36 different broadcasts during the eight years Obama was president in which Limbaugh connected him or his White House to either Sharpton, Jackson, or both, between April 14, 2009, and Sept. 21, 2016. Eleven of these came in a roughly five-month period when the #BlackLivesMatter movement was receiving particularly prominent media coverage in the aftermath of the deaths of Eric Garner, John Crawford, Michael Brown, Laquan McDonald, and Tamir Rice, all at the hands of police officers.
In fact, Limbaugh started even before Sen. Obama had wrapped up the Democratic presidential nomination, asserting on March 24, 2008, that “[t]here’s no difference in Obama and Al Sharpton; there’s no difference in Obama and Jesse Jackson. It’s just Obama had a much better mask than those guys.” That’s a perfect example of the host seeking to, as he would put it, remove Obama’s mask, i.e., his decadeslong public record of being anything but anti-white—and reveal his supposedly true, Sharptonesque beliefs.
Here’s one example that goes beyond what most of you probably imagined. On Feb. 19, 2010, Limbaugh used Sharpton to attack Obama when talking about foreign policy, in a segment that had zero to do with race. He accused the administration of snubbing the Dalai Lama during a White House visit by escorting him “out a back door... Meanwhile, Al Sharpton goes out the front do’. Yes, I spoke with a little Negro dialect there. I can do that when I want to.” The implication was that the black man who lived in the White House showed Sharpton more respect than he did the Dalai Lama.
We saw this when the topic was immigration as well. On April 26, 2010, Limbaugh went after Obama over his criticisms of Arizona’s SB 1070. In doing so, the host brought up Al Sharpton’s organizing of protests in Arizona and Obama’s opposition to SB 1070 in consecutive sentences. Limbaugh then played Obama’s remarks criticizing the law, followed quickly by five more mentions of Sharpton, before playing audio of Sharpton speaking about his plans to protest the Arizona law, followed by the host uttering his name three more times.
In that same show, Limbaugh made clear whom he believed Obama saw as the enemy: “Asking blacks and Latinos to join him in a fight. What is a campaign if not a fight? He’s asking young people, African-Americans, Latinos, and women to reconnect, to fight who? Who’s this fight against? … We’ve never had a president like this who has purposely come to divide people.” The next day, Limbaugh hit the president again over Arizona, and brought up not only Sharpton, but also Jesse Jackson, playing audio of the him calling Arizona SB 1070 “a form of terrorism.” Limbaugh then again connected the president and Jackson, and, for good measure, added that “Obama and Sharpton are now inseparable.”
More often, Limbaugh connected Obama to Sharpton on matters directly relating to African Americans and their interactions with the police. On March 24, 2012, less than a month after the unarmed Trayvon Martin was killed by George Zimmerman, Limbaugh accused President Obama of lying about the circumstances surrounding Martin’s death in order to exploit racial divisions, calling it “the story that Obama and the Sharptons and Jacksons and so forth wanted to portray.” On April 11, 2012, Limbaugh agreed after a caller suggested that Obama could have “calm[ed] this whole situation down” by just “calm[ing] down his minions, Al Sharpton and Jesse Jackson.”
On July 19, 2013, six days after the Zimmerman trial came to an end, Obama revisited his famous statement about having a son who would look like Trayvon. This time he said, “Another way of saying that is Trayvon Martin could have been me thirty-five years ago.” On July 22, Limbaugh played this remark within part of a longer statement by the president and then expressed his outrage. “What is all of this could’ve, would’ve, might’ve, it didn’t happen to him. What happened to Trayvon Martin did not happen to him ... This is a blatant attempt ... to perpetuate the myth within the black community that all blacks remain helpless victims of white supremacy, white racism.” The host also said that Obama was “no different than Jesse Jackson or Al Sharpton” before characterizing Obama’s remark as “utterly irresponsible. It is certainly not healing. It’s not even emotionally honest. But it is exactly who I’ve always thought Obama is.”
In Ferguson, Missouri, on Aug. 9, 2014, Michael Brown was killed by Police Officer Darren Wilson. Ten days later, Limbaugh brought up Sharpton and Jackson and mentioned a rumor that Sharpton had demanded money from the Brown family in return for his help with the case. The host danced around whether this was true or not. “Let’s say that that’s not true, because I can’t confirm it, I can’t back it up. But I’m telling you, I wouldn’t be surprised if it’s true.” The next words out of Limbaugh’s mouth were, “But this is the Democrat Party, folks. The president of the United States is in charge of what’s happened here.” In other words, it was all on Obama.
Limbaugh then mentioned a number of other faux scandals and outrages before bringing it all together:
What do you mean, how did it get past Obama? ... This is about wiping out anybody who opposes Obama. This isn’t Al Sharpton. This isn’t Jesse Jackson. They’re just tag-alongs now. This is Obama and [U.S. Attorney General Eric] Holder. But all of this is Barack Obama. Every event, every detail, every occurrence is Obama. And the end result is the end and absence of any opposition. So that’s what Ferguson’s all about, like all the rest of this has been about ... He’s in charge of all this. I think that it is a structured strategy, well conceived, brilliantly executed strategy for all of this crap to be happening in this country for six years.
On Nov. 26, 2014, two days after Robert McCulloch, the St. Louis County prosecutor, announced that a grand jury had decided not to indict Officer Wilson, Limbaugh returned to this same strategy. After repeating the truly scurrilous charge that Obama had “scripted” the unrest in Ferguson, and connecting him again to Sharpton and Jackson, the host then went on a long rant about what the president could have done and why he did not do it. In the end, Limbaugh said of the rioting and the president’s reaction, “He [Obama] practically excused it.”
Nearly a week later, on Dec. 1, Limbaugh discussed a series of meetings Obama administration officials had held at the White House with law enforcement professionals and civil rights leaders, including Sharpton and Attorney General Eric Holder. The host claimed that the participants were discussing “how to set up, in American classrooms, memorials to Michael Brown ... what they are doing is coming up with five ways to teach about Michael Brown and Ferguson.”
On Dec. 20, 2014, two NYPD police officers, Wenjian Liu and Rafael Ramos, were gunned down in their patrol car by Ismaaiyl Abdullah Brinsley, ostensibly as revenge for the deaths of Eric Garner and Michael Brown. Brinsley fled, and soon committed suicide. Within hours, President Obama issued a statement condemning the attack. On his next show, two days later, Limbaugh pounced: “They’ve all got blood on their hands ... Sharpton ... Everybody who has encouraged this kind of behavior on the part of average citizens against the cops ... has blood on their hands ... According to President Obama, white cops are racists.” By this point, Limbaugh had repeatedly stated that Sharpton and Obama share the same beliefs on matters of race, so this was the host’s way of taking a double swipe at the president.
The Department of Justice announced on March 4, 2015, that Officer Darren Wilson would not face federal charges for Michael Brown’s death. Rallies and protests followed and, at one of them, on March 12, 2015, two police officers were ambushed by a gunman. They were seriously wounded, but both survived. On that day’s show, Limbaugh had no doubt about whom to blame: “Congratulations are in order. President Obama, Al Sharpton, Attorney General Eric Holder, St. Louis is on fire again.”
To bring this discussion back to Trump’s attacks on Rep. Cummings and the Rev. Sharpton, on April 19, 2015, in Baltimore, Freddie Gray died of injuries he had suffered a week earlier while in police custody. The city suffered serious unrest in the days that followed, and Limbaugh saw it as another opportunity. On his May 1 broadcast, the host played remarks from Al Sharpton calling for the Justice Department to “step in and take over policing in this country.” The host said that this push was part of what liberals meant by “social justice as opposed to real justice.” And, Limbaugh added in response to a caller, “Obama basically called for it.” Why was the president behind a national takeover of the police? In order to “rein them [police] in ... really restrain them, because the presumption under which all this is happening is it’s the police departments who are guilty.” Once again, he’s saying that Sharpton and Obama hate cops and whites.
On July 13, 2015, Limbaugh discussed Obama’s upcoming visit to a federal penitentiary—the first by a sitting president—and stated that the president believed that the disproportionate incarceration rate for black men resulted from racism. He also speculated that Obama might be prepared to apologize to the inmates. “Remember, according to people like Jesse Jackson and Al Sharpton ... most of the African-American men have not broken the law. It’s a miscarriage of justice ... You know Obama agrees with that—or if he doesn’t, he will say that he does.” Limbaugh ended by noting that, “with Obama pandering to prisoners ... attacking police officers and police departments,” he had handed another issue to the Republicans “on a silver platter. The issue: Law and order.” Donald Trump would emphasize those three words often during his campaign for the White House, and as president.
Five days later, Limbaugh said that, even when the president asked people to “tone down the rhetoric” on the issue of police treatment of African Americans, he was not referring to Black Lives Matter activists or people such as Al Sharpton. Instead, “he honors those people. He brings ‘em to the White House. He conducts seminars with them ... And then, on the same day the president said that police can make the job of being a cop a lot safer by admitting their failures.” In other words, Obama was, like Sharpton, pro-BLM and anti-cop.
Public opinion research data suggests that exactly this kind of rhetoric helped move some whites who had previously voted for Obama into Trump’s column by 2016—most Obama-Trump voters expressed high levels of anger toward African Americans (and Muslims, and along with negative sentiments about immigration). It might be hard to imagine Obama voters being bigoted, but John Sides, Michael Tesler, and Lynn Vavreck (see their book, Identity Crisis, pp. 165-67) found that significant numbers of whites who voted for Obama in 2012 expressed varying degrees of white racial resentment while also overwhelmingly embracing liberal positions on issues such as taxation and the existence of climate change.
The country’s racial climate during Obama’s second term contributed to this phenomenon of racially resentful white Obama voters shifting to Trump, as Black Lives Matter and Ferguson “kicked off a massive and racially polarizing national debate over police violence against African Americans.” Limbaugh took full advantage of that climate, which ultimately benefited Trump. Clearly, Trump thinks it will benefit him again.
Ian Reifowitz is the author of The Tribalization of Politics: How Rush Limbaugh's Race-Baiting Rhetoric on the Obama Presidency Paved the Way for Trump (Foreword by Markos Moulitsas). Some of the material in this post is excerpted (in some cases with slight alterations) from the book, with full permission.