Politics

CBS News Analyst Calls Trump And Roof ‘Brothers In White Resentment’

Derek Hunter Contributor
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CBS News political analyst and Slate writer Jamelle Bouie compared President-Elect Donald Trump to terrorist Dylann Roof, convicted Thursday of murdering nine black parishioners at Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church in Charleston, South Carolina.

In a piece for Slate entitled, “Brothers In White Resentment,” Bouie compares Roof’s racist manifesto to Trump’s campaign launch speech. Saying”when read together, Trump’s announcement and Roof’s manifesto offer a duet in racial grievance.”

“With this promise to restore the moral, cultural, and political dominance of that white America, Trump grabbed the reins of the Republican Party and never let go,” Bouie contends. “Roof, in his own telling, wanted to awaken white America to the alleged threat of blacks and other nonwhites.”

Throughout the piece, Bouie equates Trump with the racist murderer. “Thursday, Roof was found guilty of hate crimes and other charges by a federal jury, and Donald Trump is president-elect of the United States. There’s no causal relationship between Trump and Roof, no tangible link between the two events. From a certain view, this means they’re unrelated. But,” Bouie writes, “that view is too narrow.”

After writing of the racist views that led Roof to commit mass murder in the hope of “starting a race war,” Bouie states, “These ideas were once marginal. But in the past year, they’ve been pulled into the mainstream by Trump and his presidential campaign. Trump has broadcast racial propaganda and anti-Semitic messages; his children have shared racist memes and reached out to white supremacist personalities.”

Donald Trump’s daughter, Ivanka, converted to Orthodox Judaism when she married her husband, Jared Kushner, who is one of Trump’s closest advisers.

Preemptively addressing critics, Bouie writes, “Roof’s crime is so monstrous that it may rankle to put him on the same continuum as Trump.”

Undeterred, he adds, “But to see both with clear eyes is to see the link between demonization and aggression, between Trump’s rhetoric, simmering with menace, and the wave of harassment, intimidation, and outright violence that followed his victory. It’s to see both Donald Trump and Dylann Roof as heralds of the darkest forces in American life, to see their common heritage in a rising tide of white identity and white nationalism.”

In his conclusion, Bouie restates and expands upon his point. “Yes, Roof will face justice. But the ideas that radicalized him will thrive, not just as an amorphous force in American life, but as an active presence in American politics,” he writes.” They will thrive in the West Wing. They will thrive from the Oval Office. They will thrive in rebuke to Barack Obama himself, what he stands for, what he means.”

Bouie appears regularly on “Face The Nation,” the CBS News Sunday news program, and was part of the CBS News post-debate coverage.

Requests for comment form CBS News were not returned.