QUIT PLAYIN: Rigga Please!

By Vincent L. Hall

“There will be a complete EXONERATION,” Trump wrote. “They never went after those that Rigged the Election. They only went after those that fought to find the RIGGERS!”

Donald Trump, Truth Social.

Riggers? Riggers? Rigga Please!

If you were blind, never heard Donald Trump talk, and could only read his statements, you could be misled. From his early taunts like “Low-Energy Jeb,” “Little Marco,” or “Crooked Hillary,” he followed a Black cultural pattern we call signifyin’ or playing the dozens.

Unbeknownst to some of their prized White friends, even “upper-middle-class Blacks” speak a different language outside the earshot of the “majority race.” Long before the term Ebonics came afloat, White linguists and scholars realized that we were bilingual.

African-American Vernacular Englisha is a variety of English natively spoken by most working- and middle-class African Americans and some Black Canadians, particularly in urban communities. Ebonics, in many ways, are the more guttural expressions of AAVE.

Donald Trump, signaled to his tribe that three of the four prosecutors who Trump must face are African American. And, of course, the one indictment filed by White special counsel Jack Smith ended up with a no-nonsense Black judge who ain’t scared of Trump either.

When I was a kid listening to blues star Little Milton with my father, I didn’t fully grasp the meaning of one of Dad’s favorite songs. “You’re on your way up now, baby, but I’ll catch you on your way back down.”

There was a time when Trump was untouchable, and we had to live in his world. But now, he has to live in ours.

That was the exact image Trump tried to portray in his social media post that ended with the word Riggers!

And Frankly Scarlet, I can’t wait to see this pompadour-wearing, over-tanned Philistine getting fingerprinted, and mug shot! If only his hateful rhetoric and virulent racism could be gone with the wind. (sic)

The Guardian was swift to point to the coding that Trump proficiently uses to keep his troops engaged and enraged.

“Trump’s allusion to the racial slur was immediately picked up by his supporters on far-right platforms, including Gab and Patriots.win. The sites hosted hundreds of posts featuring “riggers” in their headlines in a disparaging context.

The word has also been attached to numerous social media posts to Ruby Freeman and her daughter Shaye Moss. The two Black poll workers from Atlanta were falsely accused by some of the 19 defendants in the Fulton County case of committing election fraud during the 2020 vote count, and the indictment accuses Trump allies of harassing them.

Calls to violence have pro-liferated across far-right sites since the charges were made public on Monday night. Several Gab posts reproduced images of nooses and gallows and called for Willis and grand jurors who delivered the charges to be hanged. And posts on Patriots.win combined the wordplay with direct calls to violence.”

Now don’t forget that Rudolph William Louis Giuliani (his whole “gubmint” name) used the same coding in his condemnation of the two Black election workers. Listen to the tone and tenor of Rudy’s prime-time accusations against the pair vs. the reality that the facts provided.

“Among his false accusations, Giuliani had claimed Moss handed her mother a thumb drive “like they were vials of heroin or cocaine.” Moss said in her testimony to Congress that her mother had just handed her a ginger mint.”

By most accounts, riggings are to manage or conduct (something) fraudulently to produce a result or situation that is advantageous to a particular person or group. Trump wants you to rig the truth and have you believe he never disobeyed a law.

Donald John Trump wants us to think he was patriotic rather than treasonous in his attempts to save this nation. Trump is inferring that the “deep state” is using those “riggas” to prosecute him wrongfully.

It wouldn’t surprise me if Trump walked to the Fulton County courthouse wearing a crown of thorns, a dazzling white toga with a purple chiton and some Bass Pro Shop strappy sandals. He has a relatively large crowd of White Evangelicals who would die to carry his “rugged” cross from Fani Willis’ bench to Stone Mountain in Georgia, where so many heroes of the Confederate and the KKK are still heralded.

Brother Trump is a trickster, and for those in Trump’s camp that didn’t think we caught the coded, racist language…Rigga Please!

Vincent L. Hall is an author, activist, and an award-winning columnist.