Donald Trump is a racist. There I said it. Trump’s white supremacist beliefs have been the nasty, vile, ginormous elephant in the room since he first announced his candidacy and throughout his trail of fears campaign His racist tendencies have been on constant display during the first topsy-turvy year of his White House occupancy.
It is time for the media and the GOP to stop dancing around the fact that the man currently inhabiting our White House is a racist. His comments and actions are not “racially charged” they are not “racially ignorant”, they are racist! It is time for the media and the GOP to call this what it is. Trump has never made any bones about it. He reportedly even revels in stirring up the racism in his basest of base members. While it is more readily understood why Rand Paul and Trump’s GOP minions are trying to brush this back under the carpet. Many of them are racist too. Why are journalists afraid and refusing to call it? The media has no excuse. Just saying “this is who Trump is” is not cutting it and as a woman of color, I am not going to put up with it. If you are protecting the Racist-In-Chief, you are a racist yourself. (That means you Rich Lowry. Your comments on This Week on Sunday where you simply replaced “shithole” with “basket case” was as racist as what Trump said.)
We, as African Americans and other people of color, do not have the luxury of couching Trump’s racism (or anyone else’s for that matter), as anything but what it is. Because he is actively proposing and attempting to enact POLICIES based on his racist views. When a white person is racist, it has effects. From what jobs we get to where we live to how our kids fare to whether we have proper healthcare and on and on, racism determines every aspect of our lives. Too many white Americans ignore their own racism or are oblivious to Trump’s. But in Trump’s case, white Americans can’t ignore his hatred either. His blanket racism is going to adversely affect poor and middle class white people too. For example, his racist belief that black people are lazy and that it is mostly black Americans that receive welfare and Medicaid is fueling his cruel attempt to force people on Medicaid to work for their healthcare. Yet this nonsense is going to affect millions of people and most of them are not people of color. His racist hate of President Obama is also fueling his attempt to overturn Obamacare, which will be a disaster for millions of people white, black, Asian, hispanic and every racial category in between.
Here is a timeline of just the racist things he has said and done that we know printed from Vox: (I was going to do my own but they laid it out so wonderfully, I didn’t need to.)
- 1973: The US Department of Justice — under the Nixon administration, out of all administrations — sued the Trump Management Corporation for violating the Fair Housing Act. Federal officials found evidence that Trump had refused to rent to black tenants and lied to black applicants about whether apartments were available, among other accusations. Trump said the federal government was trying to get him to rent to welfare recipients. In the aftermath, he signed an agreement in 1975 agreeing not to discriminate to renters of color without admitting to discriminating before.
- 1980s: Kip Brown, a former employee at Trump’s Castle, accused another one of Trump’s businesses of discrimination. “When Donald and Ivana came to the casino, the bosses would order all the black people off the floor,” Brown said. “It was the eighties, I was a teenager, but I remember it: They put us all in the back.”
- 1988: In a commencement speech at Lehigh University, Trump spent much of his speech accusing countries like Japan of “stripping the United States of economic dignity.” This matches much of his current rhetoric on China.
- an ad in local paperssaid
- 1991: A book by John O’Donnell, former president of Trump Plaza Hotel and Casino in Atlantic City, quoted Trump’s criticism of a black accountant: “Black guys counting my money! I hate it. The only kind of people I want counting my money are short guys that wear yarmulkes every day. … I think that the guy is lazy. 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 at first denied the remarks, but later said in a 1997 Playboy interview “that the stuff O’Donnell wrote about me is probably true.”
- 1992: The Trump Plaza Hotel and Casino had to pay a $200,000 fine because it transferred black and women dealers off tables to accommodate a big-time gambler’s prejudices.
- 2000: In opposition to a casino proposed by the St. Regis Mohawk tribe, which he saw as a financial threat to his casinos in Atlantic City, Trump secretly ran a series of ads suggesting the tribe had a “record of criminal activity [that] is well documented.”
- 2004: In season two of The Apprentice, Trump fired Kevin Allen, a black contestant, for being overeducated. “You’re an unbelievably talented guy in terms of education, and you haven’t done anything,” Trump said on the show. “At some point you have to say, ‘That’s enough.”
- 2005: Trump publicly pitched what was essentially The Apprentice: White People vs. Black People. He said he “wasn’t particularly happy” with the most recent season of his show, so he was considering “an idea that is fairly controversial — creating a team of successful African Americans versus a team of successful whites. Whether people like that idea or not, it is somewhat reflective of our very vicious world.”
- 2010: In 2010, there was a huge national controversy over the “Ground Zero Mosque” — a proposal to build a Muslim community center in Lower Manhattan, near the site of the 9/11 attacks. Trump opposed the project, calling it “insensitive,” and offered to buy outone of the investors in the project. On The Late Show With David Letterman, Trump argued, referring to Muslims, “Well, somebody’s blowing us up. Somebody’s blowing up buildings, and somebody’s doing lots of bad stuff.”
- 2011: Trump played a big role in pushing false rumors that Obama — the country’s first black president — was not born in the US. He even sent investigators to Hawaii to look into Obama’s birth certificate. Obama later released his birth certificate, calling Trump a “carnival barker.” (The research has found a strong correlation between “birtherism,” as this conspiracy theory is called, and racism.) Trump has reportedly continued pushing this conspiracy theory in private.
- 2011: While Trump suggested that Obama wasn’t born in the US, he also argued that maybe Obama wasn’t a good enough student to have gotten into Columbia or Harvard Law School, and demanded Obama release his university transcripts. Trump claimed, “I heard he was a terrible student. Terrible. How does a bad student go to Columbia and then to Harvard?”
And finally, here is an interesting video from Complex News of people, who are from countries that the Racist-In-Chief called “shitholes” have all accomplished far more positive change than he has or ever will.
