The Trump Campaign’s Attack On Bail Funds Is Incredibly Racist And Misleading
As part of his bid to scare white suburban voters into supporting President Donald Trump in November, his campaign falsely accused his opponent’s campaign of freeing from jail a “murderer,” a “serial rapist,” a “violent fugitive,” and an “attempted cop killer.”
The Trump campaign tweeted four mug shots on Tuesday of Black individuals, none of them public figures, who are facing criminal charges but have not been convicted of those crimes.
The Trump campaign’s accusations are breathtakingly racist and intentionally misleading. They are meant to fool voters into believing that high-level members of Biden’s staff played an active role in freeing people who have been proven guilty of killing and raping.
“Does Joe Biden regret his campaign putting women in danger?” one Trump campaign tweet reads.
In reality, the people whose names and mugshots the Trump “War Room” texted to its 743,000 followers have no direct connection to Biden or his campaign and, again, have not been found guilty of the charges against them.
They are individuals a judge in Minnesota determined could safely await trial at home — instead of in pretrial detention during a pandemic — as long as they could find a way to pay their bail. According to the local Fox News affiliate, a bail fund called the Minnesota Freedom Fund helped come up with the money for their release.
The Minnesota Freedom Fund received an outpouring of donations earlier this year when cops arrested people who were protesting the death of George Floyd, the 46-year-old Black man who was killed by a Minneapolis police officer in May. Donating to the Minnesota Freedom Fund became an easy way for people who were outraged by the killing and sympathetic to the protesters to offer support from afar. By the end of the first week of June, the bail fund received more than $31 million in donations and began encouraging people to contribute to other organizations.
Unlike donations to political...
