Trump Lashes Out at Al Sharpton, Saying He ‘Hates Whites’

President Trump, after a weekend spent assailing a leading African-American congressman from Baltimore, widened his war on critics of color on Monday morning as he denounced the Rev. Al Sharpton as “a con man” who “Hates Whites & Cops!”

Mr. Trump seemed to be responding to a Twitter post in which Mr. Sharpton showed himself at an airport “headed to Baltimore,” presumably a reference to the president’s attacks on Representative Elijah E. Cummings, the Democrat who represents much of Maryland’s largest city.

“I have known Al for 25 years,” Mr. Trump wrote on Twitter as he reposted Mr. Sharpton’s tweet. “Went to fights with him & Don King, always got along well. He ‘loved Trump!’ He would ask me for favors often. Al is a con man, a troublemaker, always looking for a score. Just doing his thing. Must have intimidated Comcast/NBC. Hates Whites & Cops!”

Mr. Sharpton fired back not much later. “Trump says I’m a troublemaker & con man,” he wrote on Twitter. “I do make trouble for bigots. If he really thought I was a con man he would want me in his cabinet.”

Mr. Sharpton, a longtime civil rights leader and MSNBC host, has indeed known Mr. Trump from their days in New York together and has grown increasingly critical of the president over the years. He has been particularly outspoken in recent weeks as Mr. Trump assailed four first-term Democratic congresswomen of color, demanding they “go back” to their home countries even though all of them are American citizens — three of them were born in the United States and the fourth was naturalized as a teenager.

“I’ve never heard him say anything racial,” Mr. Sharpton recently told The New York Times of his time with Mr. Trump in New York. But when it came to prominent people of color, he added, “I always sensed he was not comfortable being around us. He reminded me what he was — a Queens guy. He saw us as entertainers or athletes that he had to do business with.”