President Donald Trump lashed out at popular radio host Charlamagne tha God, calling him a “racist sleazebag” and “low-IQ individual” after the Black media personality criticized the former president during an interview with Lara Trump on Fox News.
The president’s outburst, posted on his Truth Social platform, came just hours after Charlamagne — whose real name is Lenard McKelvey — told Lara Trump, “I don’t want to say that I think he did a terrible job, but if he’s doing a terrible job, I gotta call it like it is.”
Trump, an avid Fox News viewer, took offense not just to the criticism, but to the radio host and author’s stage name.
“Why is he allowed to use the word ‘GOD’ when describing himself?” Trump wrote. “He’s a Low IQ individual, has no idea what words are coming out of his mouth, and knows nothing about me or what I have done.”
While Trump claimed he deserved praise for his supposed peace deals and economic achievements, recent data shows core consumer prices continue to rise and Black unemployment has surged to its highest point since the pandemic.
“President Trump, do you realize the best way to get the headlines you want is to simply do a good job. Is to simply do right by all Americans,” said Charlamagne, responding to Trump on the show “The Breakfast Club,” a syndicated radio show based in New York that he co-hosts with DJ Envy, Jess Hilarious and Loren Lorosa. “He called me a racist. I didn’t mention race not one time while on Lara Trump.”
Some argue Trump’s insults toward the radio host are consistent with a decades-long pattern of racially charged language, discrimination, and attacks on Black individuals and institutions.
“I’m not real familiar with Charlamagne tha God because I don’t listen to a lot of podcasts or media personalities, but I know he’s an opinionated brother,” writer John Valentine wrote on X, formerly known as Twitter. “It’s good to see him responding to Trump’s unhinged rant about him. More Black men should have the courage to challenge him.”
Pattern of Racial Attacks
Trump’s current behavior mirrors a well-documented history of racially inflammatory remarks and actions. According to PBS News, Trump has repeatedly used racially coded language to describe Black prosecutors like Letitia James and Alvin Bragg, referring to them as “animals,” “degenerate psychopaths,” and “racist.” He also ran a campaign ad falsely alleging a romantic relationship between Fulton County District Attorney Fani Willis and a gang member she was prosecuting, a move critics say was intended to delegitimize her and incite racist sentiment.
“He’s taking that historical racialized language that was offensive and insulting, and the subordinating of Black persons, applying it in a contemporary space and really bubbling up that history,” Dr. Bev-Freda Jackson, a professor at American University, told PBS.
Scientific Evidence of Harm
A 2023 peer-reviewed study titled “Trickle-down Racism: Trump’s Effect on Whites’ Racist Dehumanizing Attitudes” found that Trump’s election emboldened racist views among his white supporters.
Researchers Ashley Jardina and Spencer Piston discovered that white Trump supporters expressed more dehumanizing beliefs about Black people after the 2016 election, while his opponents moved in the opposite direction.
Reported hate crimes against Black people spiked after Trump’s victory, with the surge largest in counties where he held rallies.
Former Republican presidential nominee Mitt Romney warned of the very outcome, calling Trump’s effect “trickle-down racism.”
Attempts to Erase Black History
In addition to rhetoric, Trump has acted to dismantle the institutional recognition of Black contributions to American history.
According to Human Rights Watch, the Trump administration pushed to erase content about Harriet Tubman and the Underground Railroad from National Park Service exhibits. Trump also issued an executive order targeting the National Museum of African American History and Culture as “divisive,” prompting the resignation of museum director Kevin Young.
The president’s efforts included gutting the Institute for Museum and Library Studies and creating the so-called 1776 Commission, which aimed to replace curricula like the 1619 Project with “patriotic education” that downplayed the role of racism in U.S. history.
Historians described Trump’s attack on the museum as part of his strategy to “sanitize racism.”
As noted in POLITICO, Trump’s executive order ignored slavery’s constitutional roots and failed to mention that America’s founders enshrined the institution of slavery in the Constitution by counting enslaved people as three-fifths of a person for the Census.
“It seems like we’re headed in the direction where there’s even an attempt to deny that the institution of slavery even existed, or that Jim Crow laws and segregation and racial violence against Black communities, Black families, Black individuals even occurred,” historian Clarissa Myrick-Harris, a professor at Morehouse College, told Politico.
A Legacy of Racism: ‘This is Who Donald Trump Is‘
Trump’s racial views didn’t begin with politics.
As early as 1973, the Department of Justice sued Trump and his father for housing discrimination against Black tenants. During the investigation, Trump reportedly told a federal attorney, “You know, you don’t want to live with them either.”
He later led the “birther” movement to delegitimize former President Barack Obama and notoriously called for the death penalty against the wrongly accused Central Park Five—young Black and Latino men later exonerated. Even after they were cleared, Trump refused to apologize, claiming, “These young men do not exactly have the pasts of angels.”
Trump’s pattern also includes praising white supremacists in Charlottesville as “very fine people,” suggesting immigrants from African nations come from “s—hole countries,” and telling four Congresswomen of color to “go back” to the places they came from — even though three were born in the U.S.
For many Black Americans, Trump’s attack on Charlamagne isn’t just personal — it’s historical.
“This is who Donald Trump is,” Cliff Albright, co-founder of Black Voters Matter, plainly noted. “He’s been this way all his time in public life.”