Is Donald Trump Racist? Here’s What the Record Shows

Is Donald Trump Racist? Here’s What the Record Shows

The latest controversy is not a surprise to those who have followed his career.
Is Donald Trump racist? That question has hung over the presumptive Republican nominee for president as he has called Mexicans “rapists” and proposed a ban on Muslims entering the U.S. Lately, though, the question has taken on more urgency as Trump has repeatedly publicly attacked the judge who presides over Trump University class-action lawsuits. Calling the American-born Gonzalo Curiel a “Mexican,” he said Curiel was therefore biased against him, and he added to the flurry of objections by suggesting that a Muslim judge might also be incapable of hearing a lawsuit involving any Trump entity.

In between these remarks he managed to offend by singling out a black man at one of his rallies, calling him “my African American” as if the fellow’s presence proved Trump was on the right side of the race issue.

For the long followers of Trump’s career, however, none of these incendiary remarks are especially surprising. Trump has a long record as a provocateur on matters of race and ethnicity.

It starts in 1973, when the United States Department of Justice went to court with a discrimination complaint against the Trump family business, which rented apartments across Brooklyn and Queens. Coming from the administration of Richard Nixon, who was hardly a civil rights agitator, the complaint was based on an investigation that found four different Trump employees confirming that applicants for leases were screened by race. One rental agent said Trump’s father had told him not to rent to blacks and that he actually wanted to reduce the number of African Americans in his buildings. Three doormen said they had been instructed to deflect blacks who came to Trump buildings to apply for apartments.

Though just 26 years old at the time, Donald Trump was already president of the Trump Organization. Rather than work with the government to bring the company into compliance with the law, as the New York apartment king Sam LeFrak had done, Trump retained one of the most notorious lawyers in the country, Roy Cohn, and commence an all-out legal war. Cohn, who had been Joe McCarthy’s chief inquisitor during the senator’s witch hunt for communists in the government, filed a $410 million lawsuit against the federal government and smeared the justice department attorneys with terms such as “storm troopers” and “Gestapo.” Trump complained in the press of “reverse discrimination” and alleged a “nationwide drive” to force landlords to “rent to welfare recipients.”

In the early 1970s, “African American” and “welfare” were used interchangeably and it was a well-established hallmark of dog-whistle politics, which allowed speakers to appeal to racist beliefs without using openly racist terms. More whites used welfare assistance than blacks, but welfare was regarded by some as a special benefit for minorities. In 1980 the coded language that matched welfare with undeserving minorities was revealed as Ronald Reagan spoke of “welfare queens” and “strapping young bucks.”

Trump’s countersuit in the fair housing case brought against his company was dismissed by a judge who considered it a “waste of paper.” The Trump organization eventually accommodated the feds, agreeing to a protocol intended to address the mistakes of the past.

For two years Trump would be required to supply weekly lists of vacancies to the Urban League’s Open Housing Center. When vacancies opened up in buildings where fewer than 10 percent of the tenants were black or Hispanic, the center would then have three days to submit applications from minority clients who wanted those apartments. If qualified, they were to get preference by agreeing to advertise vacancies in newspapers that served the black community. Trump was also required to advertise vacancies in press outlets serving minority communities.

Although he wound up complying with federal regulators on his rental policies, Trump had successfully staked out his position on race. He was on the side of those whites who resented civil rights laws intended to redress racism.

In 1989, he told Bryant Gumbel in an interview, “A well-educated black has a tremendous advantage over a well-educated white in terms of the job market…if I was starting off today, I would love to be a well-educated black, because I really do believe they have the actual advantage today. “ In fact, all the serious studies refuted that. However his statement did serve as a kind of shout-out to those who were ignorant about the racial dynamics in the U.S. economy.

Earlier in that same year Trump helped fan the flames of racial resentment when black and Latino teens were arrested in the infamous “Central Park jogger” attack. Trump alone chose to pay for $85,000 worth of full-page newspaper ads trumpeting, in capital letters, “BRING BACK THE DEATH PENALTY. BRING BACK OUR POLICE!” In the text Trump objected to then-Mayor Ed Koch’s plea for peace: Mayor Koch stated that “hate and rancor should be removed from our hearts. I do not think so.”

As Trump and other New Yorkers indulged in hate and rancor, the five accused were subjected to intense interrogation, most without their parents present, and gave false confessions. After years in prison, they were exonerated by DNA evidence. A book and a documentary film on the case showed how fear and race played substantial roles in the wrongful convictions but Trump, who fanned the flames, remained steadfast in his views. When the men received compensation for their imprisonment, Trump denounced the payments and smeared the men by saying, “These young men do not exactly have the past of angels.”

Next in the Trump record on race came a 1991 book by John O’Donnell, who had been president of Trump Plaza Hotel and Casino in Atlantic City. O’Donnell quoted Trump saying,“ Black guys counting my money! I hate it. The only kind of people I want counting my money are short guys wearing yarmulkes… Those are the only kind of people I want counting my money. Nobody else…Besides that, I tell you something else. I think that’s guy’s lazy. And it’s probably not his fault because laziness is a trait in blacks.”

O’Donnell’s report was shocking, but Trump did not contest it at the time. In 1997 he was interviewed for Playboy by author Mark Bowden and he confirmed that the O’Donnell book was “probably true.”

Two years later, when he was seeking the reform party nomination for president, Trump changed his tune. “I’ve never said anything like that,” he told Tim Russert on Meet The Press.

The flip-flop that saw Trump affirm John O’Donnell’s reporting and then deny it, must be weighed against Trump’s clear tendency to see things in racial terms and then say what he thinks.

A telling moment arose during a 1993 Congressional committee hearing on gambling casino operated by Indian tribes. Trump, who considered the tribes competitors, offered a flourish of insensitivity during his testimony when he said, “They don’t look like Indians to me and they don’t look like Indians to Indians.”

Trump also said that tribal gaming operators were somehow tied to organized crime and a scandal was about to erupt. “In the 19 years I have been on this committee, I have never seen such irresponsible remarks,” Rep. George Miller (D., Calif.) shouted back to Trump. (Decades later, the industry is still waiting for the scandal that Trump predicted.)

“Least racist person on earth”

In his businesses, which are private entities not subject to affirmative action policies, Trump did not establish an impressive record for diversity in the executive suite. He has spoken often about providing employment to minority workers, but in 2015 The New Yorker quoted a former Trump casino worker who said that in the 1980s black employees were hidden from view when Trump and his wife Ivana were around.

No black or Hispanic executive has ever played a prominent public role in the Trump business organization. However the foundation run by Eric Trump includes one African American vice president, Lynn Patton, who is described on the foundation website as “senior assistant” to Donald Trump’s three older adult children.

Last year Trump defended himself against complaints about his attitudes by claiming that he’s the “least racist person on earth.” Except for Patton, the Trump team has not presented to the press the name of a single key executive who is either Hispanic or African American.

Trump did manage to avoid race-related controversies for more than a decade—between the mid-1990s and 2010. Then, in 2011, Trump seized upon the conspiracy theory that suggested that Barack Obama was not an American citizen. This so-called “birther” idea had been discredited as false, and it was widely seen as a racially charged insult and had been abandoned by other leading Republicans including Senator Richard Shelby of Alabama and Rep. Roy Blount of Missouri.

Trump took up the cause with relish. He also delivered innuendo about the president’s academic record and admission to Columbia University and Harvard Law School, implying that he was academically unworthy but benefitted from affirmative action.

Which brings us to the current presidential campaign and a candidate who is being criticized by leaders of his own party for the racial tone of his remarks on the stump and in press interviews. Trump said his statements about Judge Curiel have been “misconstrued.”

Whether he’s mocking Chinese businesspeople with broken English, contorting his body to make fun of a disabled reporter, or calling out to “my African American,” again and again, Trump has provoked anxiety and played to racial divisions. Earlier this week, Joe Scarborough, a lifelong Republican and host of the Morning Joe TV show called Trump’s remarks about Judge Curiel “completely racist.” He didn’t pass the same judgment on the man himself, but from what I see, the record would support him if he did.

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http://www.huffingtonpost.com/entry/donald-trump-racist-examples_us_56d47177e4b03260bf777e83

In fact, discrimination against black people has been a pattern in his career

Workers at Trump’s casinos in Atlantic City, New Jersey, have accused him of racism over the years. The New Jersey Casino Control Commission fined the Trump Plaza Hotel and Casino $200,000 in 1992 because managers would remove African-American card dealers at the request of a certain big-spending gambler. A state appeals court upheld the fine.

The first-person account of at least one black Trump casino employee in Atlantic City suggests the racist practices were consistent with Trump’s personal behavior toward black workers.

“When Donald and Ivana came to the casino, the bosses would order all the black people off the floor,” Kip Brown, a former employee at Trump’s Castle, told the New Yorker for a September article. “It was the eighties, I was a teen-ager, but I remember it: they put us all in the back.”

Trump disparaged his black casino employees as “lazy” in vividly bigoted terms, according to a 1991 book by John O’Donnell, a former president of Trump Plaza Hotel and Casino.

“And isn’t it funny. I’ve got black accountants at Trump Castle and Trump Plaza. Black guys counting my money! I hate it,” O’Donnell recalled Trump saying. “The only kind of people I want counting my money are short guys that wear yarmulkes every day.”

“I think the guy is lazy,” Trump said of a black employee, according to O’Donnell. “And it’s probably not his fault because laziness is a trait in blacks. It really is, I believe that. It’s not anything they can control.”

Trump has also faced charges of reneging on commitments to hire black people. In 1996, 20 African Americans in Indiana sued Trump for failing to honor a promise to hire mostly minority workers for a riverboat casino on Lake Michigan.

He refused to condemn the white supremacists who are campaigning for him

Three times in a row on Feb. 28, Trump sidestepped opportunities to renounce white nationalist and former KKK leader David Duke, who told his radio audience last week that voting for any candidate other than Trump is “really treason to your heritage.”

When asked by CNN’s Jake Tapper if he would condemn Duke and say he didn’t want a vote from him or any other white supremacists, Trump claimed that he didn’t know anything about white supremacists or about Duke himself. When Tapper pressed him twice more, Trump said he couldn’t condemn a group he hadn’t yet researched.

By Feb. 29, Trump was saying that in fact he does disavow Duke, and that the only reason he didn’t do so on CNN was because of a “lousy earpiece.” Video of the exchange, however, shows Trump responding quickly to Tapper’s questions with no apparent difficulty in hearing.

It’s preposterous to think that Trump doesn’t know about white supremacist groups or their sometimes violent support of him. Reports of neo-Nazi groups rallying around Trump go back as far as August.

His white supremacist fan club includes the Daily Stormer, a leading neo-Nazi news site; Richard Spencer, director of the National Policy Institute, which aims to promote the “heritage, identity, and future of European people”; Jared Taylor, editor of American Renaissance, a Virginia-based white nationalist magazine; Michael Hill, head of the League of the South, an Alabama-based white supremacist secessionist group; and Brad Griffin, a member of Hill’s League of the South and author of the popular white supremacist blog Hunter Wallace.

A leader of the Virginia KKK who is backing Trump told a local TV reporter earlier this month, “The reason a lot of Klan members like Donald Trump is because a lot of what he believes, we believe in.”

And most recently, the Trump campaign announced that one of its California primary delegates was William Johnson, chair of the white nationalist American Freedom Party. The Trump campaign subsequently said his inclusion was a mistake, and Johnson withdrew his name at their request.

I look at the same clinton-policies and i see
‘quick sand’, destruction of the poor, destruction of the biosphere…blah blah blah.

And I think you’re wrong. In fact I think you’re misreading this whole thing, and it’s not simply a matter of “opinion.”

Certainly there’s nothing utopian or ideal there, with this round of dems.

But the destruction stuff? That’s Trump.

THe right-centrist Dems? It’s more like not doing enough. Or enough of the right things. That’s not destruction. That’s just the usual progress at a slow pace that measures the difference between my youth and the world my daughters live in.

Meanwhile if you are not white or male or straight or christian/or/mainstream, Trump’s policies will directly and materially make the world much, much worse for you. Direct impact stuff.

wv wrote:

zn wrote:

Again, how it appears to me.

No it;s not a cliff v. quicksand.

It’s a cliff v. ground that needs to be ploughed.

It’s not catastrophic both directions. It is only catastrophic one direction.

——————-
Yeah, there’s where we disagree. I think its a “cliff vs quicksand”.

No big deal to me ; We just disagree on it.

…and now, if you say ‘you dont know enuff about Trump’,
I will say ‘you dont know enuff about Hillary’….so lets not do that
w
v

But wv. I DO know about Hillary’s policies to the same extent I know Trump’s.

That’s why I see this the way I see it.

…

Billy_T wrote:

You have no idea how many bright, very knowledgable people make the claim to know facts just facts not spin and they all differ from one another.

Um, well, why would you think I wouldn’t know about that?

Because I was talking about my personal experience with people I know on an individual basis, and, you couldn;t know about that.

That entire post was about how I am personally positioned in this.

I know several dedicated professional political scientists, and as it happens, the last couple of days, on the phone and through email and in facebook PMs, they have all been putting the screws on.

I get competing, different narratives, all claiming to be just the facts I need to account for, and I tell them that I am getting more than one narrative that claims to be the facts I need to account for, and so I cannot help but notice how different they are. And in terms of this conversation with you here, it’s how different they are from each other, and how different you are from each of them. And when I say that to any single individual each individually gets offended.

So my reminder is always this.

I can’t take the time to sort out and debate details because one crucial thing is missing and its absence makes all the difference. That crucial thing is—I don’t care. It’s hard to sort out the details when you’re not interested.

In light of that I draw back and say, this is my real priority, and it absorbs all my energy.

The focus is on the present difference in policies going forward. On the one hand, I will be resigned to more of the patient slow awareness that progress is slow…and that’s the way I have lived this (politics) my entire life. So it’s not new.

On the other hand, there’s clear, regressive, catastrophe where we (as I see it) will lose ground.

That’s my focus and that’s what I tell everyone who is pressuring me at the moment to ascent to their narrative of past facts about past elections.

Enough. It’s cacophony. In contrast the focus is simple and easy.

That’s all I am saying.

…

Billy_T wrote:

And my entire life I have never met anyone who possessed “the truth” on anything when it comes to political vision. I always just see better or worse theories, and clashing assumptions and premises. That’s just how I approach all of this. That’s me.

That’s fine. But if you actually do believe no one possesses the truth, then it’s sensible for you not to lead with the claim that someone else is “searching for a dubious truth,” when all I did was use numbers and draw a logical inference from those numbers and our electoral system.

It’s not “spin” to say what is self-evidently the case. Presidents don’t win because of one particular state. Again, just as that last-second field goal can’t possibly “win the game.” And within those states, they don’t win based on third-party votes which don’t even match those lost to Democratic voters who DIRECTLY voted for Bush. By definition, the voting process is cumulative within each state. By definition, the electoral process is cumulative within the nation as a whole.

Those ARE facts. No spin. Just facts.

BT, all that’s lost on me. I wouldn’t waste my time if I were you. You have no idea how many bright, very knowledgable people make the claim to know facts just facts not spin and they all differ from one another. Differ from one another and differ from you. And when I say this to any of them they all get offended and remind me that their narratives are just true. I tune it out.

I just don’t play the game.

I can give you a perfectly good analogy from football talk. Back in the St. Louis days I read several different guys who attended camp regularly. And there were always times over certain issues where inevitably they all differed on what the facts were. I would point this out and each individually would take offense because each individually KNEW the facts on that issue, even though they all differed. My take was, well to you you may “know the facts” but to me you are all different so I account for that.

Actually when it comes to sorting out the facts over football analysis I am more patient than I am with political history. And actually the different voices talking to me about political history are also different from football in this respect…I care about football. To me the political scientists are all arguing over a sport I don’t even care about. That is, whose narrative of political history is just the facts. They all claim it’s them. But to me it’s like hearing a drawn-out detailed story about baseball when I don’t care about baseball.

So with political history, what I do instead is look at all the highly informed and detailed people telling me opposite things, and I go…I don’t care.

My focus is on the present and what I believe are the choices in the present.

When it comes to the facts of political history, I have many camp reporters trying to get me to “hear” distinctly different, opposed narratives. Every single one of them is offended when I say this to them, too.

I listen to be polite, until I reach “enough” mode, but either way there always comes the time when I have to decide for myself, and the decision for myself is to set priorities and focus. The minutia is just guys arguing over a sport that doesn’t interest me.

Billy_T wrote:

the shot about “trying to find a dubious truth.” Um, no. That’s not what I was trying to do. I was analyzing the facts on the ground, and just asked for your take on Nader’s role in 2000.

Beyond all of that? We don’t differ on the terrible effects of a Trump presidency. I despise everything he stands for.

I am telling you how things appear to ME. And I get dozens of people telling me “the facts on the ground,” and they’re all different, and all I ever hear in it is spin. For example I have friends who are career published professional political scientists who spin it differently, both from you and from each other, and I also see how all the people behind the different spins all sincerely believe what they gave me was “the truth.” I would even take the considerable time it took to sort it out, but, I can’t climb over this one wall—the wall being, I don’t care.

Of course we both despise Trump. The difference being, maybe, I would never risk, under any circumstances, him being elected. So the minutia and details and different historical spins I hear? I tune it all out.

That’s a fair warning to you about how I personally approach this issue.

And my entire life I have never met anyone who possessed “the truth” on anything when it comes to political vision. I always just see better or worse theories, and clashing assumptions and premises. That’s just how I approach all of this. That’s me.

Billy_T wrote:

zn wrote:

I’ll blame them. Shrug. Not that anyone should or will care if I do.

If you are a progressive Trump is clearly worse than the Clinton. That is if you look at policies. And by worse, it’s significantly worse. Not 6 of one half a dozen of the other– worse.

That’s even at the level of economic policies.

And this is not “opinion.” An objective comparison of policies shows the difference.

And I might add, the ones who will be the most screwed over by Trump do not include anyone posting here.

I can’t remember your take on this, ZN. Did you blame Nader for Bush in 2000? I’m guessing you didn’t, but am not sure.

From my research, the folks who did just don’t have a case. First off, our electoral system doesn’t work that way. It doesn’t allow for one state to ever be definitive. It works on cumulative totals, obviously. Bush won 30 states. Gore won 20. Bush doesn’t get to the 271 without all of them. No one state can be definitive, just as a last-second field goal doesn’t actually “win” the game. All the things leading up to that count, too.

Second: even if we go by the premise that Florida was definitive — it can’t be — some 308,000 registered Dems voted directly for Bush. So Nader’s 24,000 votes from likely Dems is dwarfed by that, obviously. And, again, all 50 states have their variables as well. Counterfactuals can’t be cherry-picked and still have some chance at mattering.

Anyway . . . . if the choice is between Clinton and Trump, I hope Trump loses. But I’m not happy with those choices, at all.

I don’t care about the minutia of prior elections. To me that’s just trying to find a dubious “truth” to generalize with. I generally don’t get into that stuff and I fuzz out when people go there. To me it’s never illuminating. And so honestly, you can do and believe what you want about that. It’s just never persuasive to me.

My one thing is this. Trump is clearly worse, on every single level. That’s all that matters to me. It’s a “stand.”

To me, this is a kind of Weimar moment, to use an analogy. Yes the status quo needs change and reforming. I’m a lifelong leftist, so no need to preach to the choir. But…let’s not pretend that if the wrong guy wins, it won’t make any difference. It just so obviously will. On many levels but to use just one example…the supreme court. Fuck that up and we will all go to our graves before it’s ever fixed. All the rest to me is fine print.
…

I’ll blame them. Shrug. Not that anyone should or will care if I do.

If you are a progressive Trump is clearly worse than the Clinton. That is if you look at policies. And by worse, it’s significantly worse. Not 6 of one half a dozen of the other– worse.

That’s even at the level of economic policies.

And this is not “opinion.” An objective comparison of policies shows the difference.

And I might add, the ones who will be the most screwed over by Trump do not include anyone posting here.