Rep. Bobby Rush on Wednesday said President Trump was trying to “instigate a race war” by sending federal officers to break up violent protests in Portland, Oregon.
Mr. Rush, an Illinois Democrat whose district includes parts of Chicago, said the federal intervention is part of Mr. Trump’s plan to declare himself “the real Grand Wizard of the Ku Klux Klan.”
“That’s Trump’s game plan. Trump wants to instigate a race war. He wants to have Black folks fighting White folks,” he said on SiriusXM’s “The Joe Madison Show.”
He said the race war would appeal to Mr. Trump’s base and help him get reelected.
“So he can rise up and say, ’I’m the real Grand Wizard of the Ku Klux Klan, and I’m the President. Reelect me,” Mr. Rush said. “That’s what he’s trying to do. He’s trying to play to the fears, to the racial animus that exists among certain White people, and he will do everything and anything to do that because he wants to be reelected at all costs.”
Mr. Trump also has proposed sending federal law enforcement into Chicago and other big cities where violent crime spiked in the wake of racial justice protests and calls to defund police departments.
Law enforcement officers from the Department of Homeland Security went into Portland to protect a federal courthouse from violent protests that have raged in the city for nearly two months since the death of George Floyd, a Black man, during an arrest by Minneapolis police.
Mr. Rush has experience with calls for racial warfare. In 1968, he co-founded the Illinois chapter of the Black Panther Party and served as the group’s “defense minister.”
“Black people have been on the defensive for all these years,” he said then. “The trend now is not to wait to be attacked. We advocate offensive violence against the power structure.”
He repudiated the Black Panthers in the 1970s before entering electoral politics, saying the group had slipped into “glorifying thuggery,” though he still called his time with them “part of my maturing.”
• S.A. Miller can be reached at smiller@washingtontimes.com.
• Victor Morton can be reached at vmorton@washingtontimes.com.
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