The truth behind President Trump’s recent tweets about Baltimore became crystal clear the moment Al Sharpton got involved and the media echoed “racism.” It’s all just another race-hustling con game from the masters of exploiting fake grievances.

When the president riffed on Representative Elijah Cummings (D-Md.) and his failure to help his constituents in West Baltimore—home to some of the most blighted ghettos in America—every liberal journalist in the country jumped to see who could be the first among those outraged by Donald Trump’s supposed “racism.”

The winner, undoubtedly, was CNN’s Victor Blackwell—who went full “Oscar clip” and pathetically choked back tears while describing the tweets on national television.

It’s Sharpton’s shameless participation, however, that really pulls the curtain down on the whole farce. As the president aptly pointed out Monday morning, Sharpton basically pioneered this race-hustle game. Reflecting on his 25 years of knowing Sharpton, President Trump warned that “Al is a con man, a troublemaker, always looking for a score.”

Sharpton has made a career out of promoting hoax hate crimes—most notably the unbelievably harmful lie about New York police officers raping black teenager Tawana Brawley. Sharpton also incited poor black New Yorkers to attack Jews in “Hymietown,” and regularly supports fake accusations of racism against the heads of companies and politicians until they pay up—the “shakedown,” as they call it in New York.

Nothing has changed. That’s exactly what Sharpton is doing now. The only difference is that, with President Trump in the White House, every liberal journalist wants in on the action.

None of the people slamming the President are actually looking for “justice” or are genuinely concerned about racism. They’re just looking to score political points.

The media didn’t bat an eye when Senator Bernie Sanders (D-Vt.) described parts of Baltimore by saying, “You would think that you were in a Third World country.” They didn’t care when Baltimore’s own disgraced Democrat mayor, Catherine Pugh, complained about the same infestation of rats and dead animals that the President mentioned in his tweet.

“Oh, my God, you can smell the dead animals,” Pugh said during an unguarded walk through part of Cummings’s district last year. “What the hell? We should just take all this [expletive] down.”

Nor did they call out President Barack Obama when he, in a much more formal setting than a silly Twitter battle, used the phrase, “crime-infested,” to describe Democrat-controlled cities such as Baltimore. Now that President Trump has used it, however, that phrase has the entire left-wing media up in arms, absurdly accusing the President of equating black people to an “infestation.”

The difference isn’t the language. It’s that, just like Sharpton, the Democrats know their marks for a shakedown—or at least they think they do.

If the people attacking the president were really concerned about the residents of Baltimore’s blighted neighborhoods, they’d be addressing the concerns those residents raised in the very videos Donald Trump tweeted out. They’d be outraged that the Democratic Party has been taking Baltimore’s votes for granted while consistently failing to improve conditions in that city. They’d be looking for solutions to literal rat infestations.

They would not, however, keep using the same tactics that led to Baltimore’s latest, horrific murder wave—a crime spree that started exactly the moment Black Lives Matter used Sharpton’s signature shakedown tactics to accuse the city’s police of racism after a drug dealer died in police custody.

Luckily, President Trump is wise to this game. He was a prominent businessman in New York City throughout Al Sharpton’s heyday. He knows this race-hustling game, and he knows that it never pays to back down to a notorious con man.

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