Francis Wilkinson, Columnist

Trump Attack on John Lewis Fits Ugly Pattern

Linking a legendary black leader to crime and dysfunction.

January 18, 2017 at 6:34 PM UTC

Francis Wilkinson is a Bloomberg Opinion columnist covering US politics and policy. Previously, he was executive editor for the Week and a writer for Rolling Stone.

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In November 2015, when most Republicans and political journalists, including this one, were discounting Donald Trump’s ability to win the presidency, Trump tweeted an image of a thuggish-looking dark-skinned man holding a handgun over a set of 2015 statistics about race and crime.

The statistics, attributed to the nonexistent “Crime Statistics Bureau -- San Francisco” for a year that then wasn’t even concluded, were transparently bogus. But two related data points were especially notable.