Trump assailed Sharpton as “a con man” and “a troublemaker.” The president’s words were in response to Sharpton planning a news conference in Baltimore to rebuke Trump for recent tweets directed at Rep. Elijah E. Cummings (D-Md.) — whose congressional district includes Baltimore — in which the president blamed the city’s challenges on the congressman and other liberals.

The president alluded obliquely to decades-old stories involving Sharpton, a frequent Trump critic.

Not long after the tweets, Sharpton’s name began trending on Twitter — and so did the story of Tawana Brawley, a 15-year-old who in 1987 made national headlines with a horrific rape accusation that later proved to be false. She claimed she had been raped by four white men before being found in a trash bag covered in feces with racial slurs written on her body.

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Sharpton was an adviser for Brawley and often spoke in her defense at news conferences and marches. After a grand jury concluded that the attack did not happen, Sharpton — along with Brawley and other advisers — was successfully sued by Steven Pagones, the prosecutor whom Brawley accused of assaulting her. Since then, perceptions of Sharpton have been negative among many of the white conservatives who make up Trump’s base.

Sharpton is regularly criticized in conservative media and depicted as someone who frequently takes advantage of racial tensions by magnifying questionable stories to boost his public profile. That’s how Trump supporters described him Monday.

But Trump supporters’ argument that Sharpton lacks credibility because of his position on racial matters 30 years ago seems hypocritical if you consider that one way these same people have tried to rally support for the president is by encouraging voters to ignore his past controversies.

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Perhaps the most glaring example of this was in 2018, in response to allegations of a past affair between Trump and an adult-film actress. Then, Franklin Graham, an evangelical minister who advises the president, told MSNBC: “I believe at 70 years of age the president is a much different person today than he was four years ago, five years ago, 10 years ago, whatever. We just have to give the man the benefit of the doubt.”

But critics say Trump does not have a history of giving people unlike himself the benefit of the doubt, especially when they are people of color.

In 1989, after a young white woman was brutally raped and beaten while jogging in Central Park, Trump spent more than $80,000 on full-page ads in four New York newspapers demanding that the death penalty be reinstated so that the five black and Latino teenagers suspected of the crime could be executed.

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Years later, the men were exonerated with the help of another man’s confession and DNA evidence. By the time they received a $41 million settlement from the city of New York, the five men had spent much of their lives behind bars. Trump has never apologized for calling for their deaths.

Efforts to paint Trump as an advocate for criminal justice reform don’t factor that in.

It is not just the president’s past stances on criminal-justice issues that his supporters want voters to forget or believe he is rehabilitated from. They want voters to ignore his failed marriages — as well as the tabloid drama surrounding them — and that the real estate developer who shot to stardom with a hit television show portraying him as a successful businessman has more business failings under his belt than is commonly known.

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Trump surrogates want voters to turn a blind eye to the fact that the leader of the Republican Party was once a Democrat and such a supporter of liberal policies that he regularly donated to Democratic candidates. And they want voters to forget that, when it comes to matters of race, Trump’s record of being on the wrong side of issues was so significant that the federal government successfully sued him for racial discrimination.