Charles Barkley Goes In On Trump, Says He ‘Made It More Acceptable To Be Racist’

Listen: I definitely have a love/hate relationship with the social commentary of NBA icon Charles Barkley. I mean, he did defend the cops who killed Breonna Taylor that one time,  but when it comes to his thoughts on President Donald Trump and his supporters, he tends to be pretty spot-on while stating what’s obvious to most, but a reality that consistently evades his loyal sheep.

During a recent episode of “The Chris Cuomo Project” podcast, with Chris Cuomo, Barkley spoke on how Trump has grown “more bitter and angry” in his old age, and that’s why he’s been wasting his time beefing with late-night hosts Jimmy Kimmel and Stephen Colbert instead of fixing the economy that he has been tariffing down the drain with idiotic trade wars and his gas price-hiking war in Iran (I mean, he didn’t say all that, but that was the gist).

Then he talked about Trump’s racism, the way he made racism great again, and the way former President Barack Obama could never have gotten away with even a fraction of the behavior Trump displays every time he’s in front of a camera or behind a keyboard.

“He’s made it popular to be racist,” he said. “There’s no consequences for being racist now. A lot of people are wearing it with a badge of courage. He never denounces it. Nah, he should denounce it. He’s made it more acceptable to be racist.”

I mean, I wouldn’t say there are no consequences for being racist for anybody, as it’s not exactly a rare occasion when MAGA morons get themselves fired for thinking Trump’s bigotry and general ridiculousness transfers well to their places of employment. But where Barkley is demonstrably correct is that, in the MAGA era, it has become normalized for elected officials and major news outlets to be explicitly bigoted in public forums without most of them taking any major hits to their political careers. And why would they take a hit when their president does it, too?

Then there’s the Obama factor.

“Can you imagine President Obama saying that to a white woman? Call her Miss Piggy?” the former Philadelphia 76ers power forward said. “If President Obama called a white woman Miss Piggy, America would be up in arms and be like, ‘Can you believe this dude said that?’”

And not a lie was told.

As much as white conservatives love to claim erroneously that Obama was this widely divisive president who caused racism to proliferate across the country, they would be hard-pressed to find a single social media post or clip of an interview or speech where he’s spewing the same kind of hatred that Trump does on the slightest of whims on any given day.

Can you imagine what people would have said if Obama got on stage and publicly mused that Iran could “take out” major U.S. cities and it would be a “small price to pay” to get rid of the political opposition?

Let’s be real about one thing: it’s not Obama’s fault that racism became more publicly prominent under his watch. All that actually happened is a Black man became president, and white people responded with racism.

Anyway, Barkley also had a little smoke for Democrats and their policies. He spoke against some on “the left” who advocate for defunding the police and abolishing ICE, which is why when Fox News — that profound, grounded-in-reality institution of journalistic integrity — reported on the podcast episode, it did so under the headline, “Charles Barkley shreds radical left-wing policies right to Chris Cuomo’s face during interview.”

Fox and other right-wing outlets opted to ignore the overwhelming majority of the interview to highlight the roughly two-minute block, during which he said this:

“Some of these people are out here talking about no ICE, no prisons, using words like socialism… I don’t believe in that… No cops? This is some of the stupidest shit ever… And you need to have ID when you go vote.”

Like I said, I have a love/hate thing with Barkley. He’s not exactly a person I would expect to understand the nuance of issues like the SAVE Act, Democratic socialism, or the middle ground between the complete eradication of immigration enforcement and the call for an end to the Trump administration’s cruel and unusual approach to said enforcement.

Yeah — you kinda have to grade Charles Barkley on a curve, but he’s trying at least.

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