Donald Trump’s compassionate and sincere outreach to black voters seems to have failed with at least one of them: Academy Award–winning actor, producer, and director Don Cheadle. Cheadle, who won a Best Picture Oscar for producing Crash and was nominated for Best Actor for his performance in Hotel Rwanda, was incensed at Trump’s wildly offensive response to the death of NBA star Dwyane Wade’s cousin, which, according to Trump, was “just what I have been saying,” whatever that means. Cheadle responded to the tweet by calling the new face of the Republican Party “truly a P.O.S.”
(The Donald Trump tweet Cheadle links to above is no longer there—Trump deleted it because, in addition to sounding unusually sociopathic even for the avatar of the Republican Party’s white nationalist base, he misspelled Wade’s name. He immediately reposted a corrected version.) Cheadle may have moved beyond insults into the realm of Secret Service investigations in his next tweet, however, encouraging Trump to “die in a grease fire.”
Cheadle then spent the next few hours engaging with Twitter users coming to Trump’s defense, from wildly inaccurate estimates of his net worth:
To speculations about his diet:
To straightforward racism:
While the utility of talking to Trump supporters on Twitter is, let’s say, questionable, Cheadle’s tweets are an example of the increasingly frank descriptions Donald Trump is inspiring. Last Sunday, Cher called him “a fucking idiot” at a Clinton campaign event; in June, Sen. Elizabeth Warren called him a “thin-skinned racist bully.” Nevertheless, as Trump assured his mostly white audience, he anticipates winning 95 percent of the black vote in his 2020 re-election bid, which, given the polls, will presumably take place in a Good Bye, Lenin!–style Oval Office mock-up built in the basement of Trump Tower by his children.
