O.J. Simpson is dead. But he lives as a player in the 2024 presidential election.
Simpson’s famous murder trial proved beyond all reasonable doubt that rich and famous people can create a media circus and gum up processes with endless delays. Exhibit A of Simpson’s continued power is on display right now in the case of New York v. Donald Trump.
Trump is mimicking Simpson’s daily use of celebrity and race to distract public focus from charges of election interference through the use of “hush money” paid to an adult film actress.
Attention has already been diverted from the criminal charges to the gag orders placed upon Trump after his comments about the judge. There are also Trump’s relentless insults and racially charged attacks against Black prosecutors. It is all parallel to Simpson’s ploy of playing on Black distrust of white police.
Trump has also made himself a victim of a Latino judge, intensifying a loud dog whistle to white nationalists among his supporters.
Even before the trial began, Trump said Judge Juan Merchan should recuse himself because of political bias. He derided Merchan as a “highly conflicted and corrupt judge.” It was a replay of 2016, when Trump said that a federal judge in Indiana dealing with class action claims of fraud against Trump University was biased against him because he was Mexican.
“I have a judge who is a hater of Donald Trump, a hater,” he said at one rally.
Judge Gonzalo Curiel was born in Indiana to Mexican immigrant parents. That was enough for Trump to launch his racist attack.
Trump is also using racialized tactics against Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg, New York Attorney General Letitia James and Fulton County District Attorney Fani Willis.
Alvin Bragg is a “racist in reverse,” he wrote online last year. He said Bragg should be held accountable for the crime of “interference in a presidential election.”
Trump has also written that Bragg is a “Soros-backed animal,” a dehumanizing effort suggesting the black D.A. is working mindlessly for a major donor to Democrats, George Soros.
Trump attacked James as “racist A.G. Letitia… James.” He also complained that Willis was “racist” and that his Georgia indictment was a “con job.”
He said that instead of prosecuting him, Willis should be going after unnamed people who, he claimed, without evidence, rigged the presidential race in Georgia. “They only went after those that fought to find the riggers,” he posted. That use of “riggers,” which sounds suspiciously similar to an anti-black slur, in turn led Trump supporters in an online platform to openly trash Willis by openly using the racist word.
While he attacks judges and prosecutors as racists, Trump plays to base stereotypes about Black people as criminals by absurdly claiming that his police mugshot is helping to improve his standing among black voters.
That tactic was a reminder that Simpson’s backers pointed to a Time cover photo with an artificially darkened face of the former football star as evidence that he was a victim of white racism.
Trump’s constant use of race to distract from the criminal charges against him extends to arguments from his lawyers that he can’t get a fair trial in Manhattan or Washington D.C.
Trump has suggested moving the New York trial out of Manhattan into Republican-friendly Staten Island.
Is that tactic any different from the lawyers for the white police officers charged with brutally beating Rodney King, arguing that their trial should be held outside of Los Angeles, in the mostly white suburb of Simi Valley? A jury there acquitted those police.
The racial divide over Simpson’s guilt started with Simpson fleeing down a Los Angeles freeway in a white Ford Bronco driven by a friend. He brought with him a passport, money, a gun and disguises.
The fact of his flight and other evidence badly implicated Simpson. But racial tensions left over from the police acquittal in King’s beating led prosecutors to be cautious in hammering him with evidence not directly tied to the murders. That shifted the focus to police behavior and their handling of evidence.
The police were on trial, and they were essentially convicted. The debate between Blacks and whites over whether to trust the police continues to this day.
The May 2020 killing of George Floyd by a white police officer during Trump’s presidency gave a much higher profile to the Black Lives Matter movement, which had started six years earlier. Trump and his far-right backers dismissed the large nationwide protests of 2020 as threatening and focused on incidents of violence. They also focused on calls to “Defund the Police,” a fringe view, to attack Democrats, even though violent crime is down nationwide and in most blue cities.
When Simpson was acquitted in 1995, Black Howard University students reacted with cheers. Their reaction had less to do with Simpson’s supposed innocence than a sense of payback for the reality of racist cops abusing black people.
With time, polls show most people, Black and white, now agree Simpson was guilty.
Despite the election of a Black president, the gains that Americans have made in race relations are threatened by backlash, as the Trump presidency revealed.
It is now too late for jurors to see the racial games being played on them by Simpson’s lawyers. Let us hope it is not too late for voters to see through the racist manipulations being used by Trump.
Juan Williams is an author and a political analyst for Fox News Channel.