Donald Trump's Latest Tweet Is An Outrage

GOP presidential frontrunner Donald Trump has had quite the weekend of missteps. Following an altercation and the removal of a Black Lives Matter activist at a recent campaign stop in Birmingham, Alabama, on Saturday, the Donald said that maybe the demonstrator should have been "roughed up." The following day, Trump was interviewed on ABC's This Week and again said he saw mostly Arab people celebrate in New Jersey when the buildings fell on 9/11. Later in the interview, he went on to detail his support of once again implementing waterboarding as a means of torture and investigation. His grand finale, however, was retweeting a list of erroneous crime statistics from a made up statistics bureau. Donald Trump's tweet on murder statistics is an outrage.

Twitter has been quick to correct and call out Trump over the tweet, which states that 97 percent of African Americans murdered in the country this year were murdered by African Americans. The graphic, from the nonexistent "Crime Statistics Bureau — San Francisco," shows what appears to be a racist illustration of an African American man with a bandanna on his head and another covering his face, his left arm outstretched with a pistol cocked to the side. If the graphic alone wasn't enough to raise suspicion then the language of the statistics — an example being "whites killed by blacks" totaled 81 percent — certainly raises red flags.

According to information obtained from the FBI's Uniformed Crime Reports for 2014, the numbers that Trump presents mark a major departure from the verifiable statistics presented by the Criminal Justice Information Services Division. Being that 2015 is not yet over, information has yet to be released regarding nationwide murder rates and demographics. In 2014, 84 percent of murders of white victims were perpetrated by other white people. Regarding black-on-black murders, that number totaled 89 percent. Likewise, information from San Francisco's Police Department, quite possibly the closest thing to a "Crime Statistics Bureau" from the city, does not provide murder statistics from 2015, nor does it break down previous numbers based on race.

Trump has yet to address the tweet, which has been picked up and scrutinized by the likes of Gawker, ThinkProgress, and the New Republic. Instead, Trump has continued to retweet messages of support for himself and for good reason. The candidate appears to be untouchable and his numbers have only continued to rise following the Paris attacks last Friday. Data from Real Clear Politics shows that Trump has a nearly 8 point lead on on second-place candidate Ben Carson nationally.