Much of the frenzied media coverage of what CNN dubbed
“48 hours of turmoil for the Trump White House” has overlooked one rather crucial point: Trump doesn’t like being forced to denounce racism for the very simple reason that he himself is, and always has been, a racist.
Consider the first time the president’s name appeared on
the front page of the New York Times, more than 40 years ago. “Major Landlord Accused of Antiblack Bias in City,” read the headline of the A1 piece on Oct. 16, 1973, which pointed out how Richard Nixon’s Department of Justice had sued the Trump family’s real estate company in federal court over alleged violations of the Fair Housing Act.
“The government contended that Trump Management had refused to rent or negotiate rentals ‘because of race and color,’” the Times revealed. “It also charged that the company had required different rental terms and conditions because of race and that it had misrepresented to blacks that apartments were not available.” (Trump later settled with the government without accepting responsibility.)
Over the next four decades, Trump burnished his reputation as a bigot: he was accused of ordering
“all the black [employees] off the floor” of his Atlantic City casinos during his visits; claimed
“laziness is a trait in blacks” and “not anything they can control”; requested Jews
“in yarmulkes” replace his black accountants;
told Bryan Gumbel that “a well-educated black has a tremendous advantage over a well-educated white in terms of the job market”;
demanded the death penalty for a group of black and Latino teenagers accused of raping a jogger in Central Park (and, despite their later exoneration
with the use of DNA evidence, has
continued to insist they are guilty); suggested a Native American tribe
“don’t look like Indians to me”; mocked Chinese and Japanese trade negotiators by doing
an impression of them in broken English; described undocumented Mexican immigrants as
“rapists”; compared Syrian refugees to
“snakes”; defended two supporters who assaulted a homeless Latino man as
“very passionate” people “who love this country”;
pledged to ban a quarter of humanity from entering the United States; proposed a
database to track American Muslims that
he himself refused to distinguish from the Nazi registration of German Jews; implied Jewish donors
“want to control” politicians and are all
sly negotiators; heaped praise on the
“amazing reputation” of conspiracy theorist Alex Jones, who has blamed America’s problems on a
“Jewish mafia”; referred to a black supporter at a campaign rally as
“my African-American”; suggested the grieving Muslim mother of a slain U.S. army officer
“maybe … wasn’t allowed” to speak in public about her son; accused an American-born Hispanic judge of being “a
Mexican”; retweeted
anti-Semitic and
anti-black memes,
white supremacists, and even
a quote from Benito Mussolini; kept a book of
Hitler’s collected speeches next to his bed;
declined to condemn both David Duke and the Ku Klux Klan; and spent five years
leading a “birther” movement that was bent on
smearing and
delegitimizing the first black president of the United States, who Trump also
accused of being the founder of ISIS.
Oh and remember: we knew all of this
before he was elected president of the United States of America.
