What is racist about Trump’s use of the word “carnage” is that it is directed at no other group but black Americans. We live in a society where, say, women are perpetually brutalized and killed by men, but, according to Trump, this does not qualify as “carnage.” He has said absolutely nothing about the unending domestic violence epidemic in Tweets or his inauguration speech, nor has he ever mentioned the use of guns in non-terrorist mass killings or in rural suicides or the fact that toddlers kill more people than terrorists, as Lindy West pointed out in The Guardian. No, he specifically means Chicago, and more specifically blacks in Chicago, and, if we get right down to it, very poor blacks in Chicago (the dark realm of “chi-raq“). Because nothing else is meant by carnage but this, we can conclude with great confidence that it is another word for savage, and because the savages involved in this context are black, we can read the truth of Trump’s tweet as: “If Chicago doesn’t fix those horrible ‘niggers’… I will send in the Feds!”
