http://www.nydailynews.com/news/politics/donald-trump-calls-african-american-neighborhoods-ghettos-article-1.2848477Donald Trump calls African-American neighborhoods 'ghettos' with 'so many horrible problems'
Trump has previously been rebuked for associating African-Americans – who comprise roughly 13% of the total population – with the words “inner cities.”
This article was from October of last year, before the election and well before the current Lewis thing. Like anyone Trump has his own lexicon / set of relations he uses in the wording he chooses to uses. And he has a long history of equating the term "inner cities" with african americans burning and looting and running wild. So the idea that a new statement he makes which "just happens" to equate an African American political leader to the idea of burning inner cities should be taken completely on it's own merits is disingenious, because that's asking us to take the words entirely out of context and to ignore previous statements and associations made by the same speaker. He was already known for coding racist language in this exact fashion.
"Benefit of the doubt" goes out the window what you have an
earned reputation for doing the exact thing you seem to be doing. e.g. if a known con artist hits you with an unlikely story about how you need to give them a lot of money, you can say "well I have no reason
not to trust you, purely based on that story" or you can say "well, the last 17 times you spun a sob story it turned out you were pulling a con ..." Sure, they
might really need the money that one time, but are you going to give them the benefit of the doubt? Fool me once ... etc.
No, if you have a pre-existing reputation for
explicitly connecting two different things (as Trump did in the election campaign in this situation), then you make a statement that
implicitly connects the two things, you do not deserve benefit of the doubt that you
didn't mean to connect those two things that one time. Note that Trump's not the one reeling this back in, it's other people trying to claim Trump didn't actually mean what it sounds like he meant. But that's revisionism since he clearly made those very connections in his campaign speeches.