Is Donald Trump a Racist?

One early red flag arose in 1973, when President Richard Nixon’s Justice Department — not exactly the radicals of the day — sued Trump and his father, Fred Trump, for systematically discriminating against blacks in housing rentals.

I’ve waded through 1,021 pages of documents from that legal battle, and they are devastating. Donald Trump was then president of the family real estate firm, and the government amassed overwhelming evidence that the company had a policy of discriminating against blacks, including those serving in the military.

To prove the discrimination, blacks were repeatedly dispatched as testers to Trump apartment buildings to inquire about vacancies, and white testers were sent soon after. Repeatedly, the black person was told that nothing was available, while the white tester was shown apartments for immediate rental.

A former building superintendent working for the Trumps explained that he was told to code any application by a black person with the letter C, for colored, apparently so the office would know to reject it. A Trump rental agent said the Trumps wanted to rent only to “Jews and executives,” and discouraged renting to blacks.

Donald Trump furiously fought the civil rights suit in the courts and the media, but the Trumps eventually settled on terms that were widely regarded as a victory for the government. Three years later, the government sued the Trumps again, for continuing to discriminate.

In fairness, those suits date from long ago, and the discriminatory policies were probably put in place not by Donald Trump but by his father. Fred Trump appears to have been arrested at a Ku Klux Klan rally in 1927; Woody Guthrie, who lived in a Trump property in the 1950s, lambasted Fred Trump in recently discovered papers for stirring racial hatred.

Yet even if Donald Trump inherited his firm’s discriminatory policies, he allied himself decisively in the 1970s housing battle against the civil rights movement.

Another revealing moment came in 1989, when New York City was convulsed by the “Central Park jogger” case, a rape and beating of a young white woman. Five black and Latino teenagers were arrested.

Trump stepped in, denounced Mayor Ed Koch’s call for peace and bought full-page newspaper ads calling for the death penalty. The five teenagers spent years in prison before being exonerated. In retrospect, they suffered a modern version of a lynching, and Trump played a part in whipping up the crowds.

As Trump moved into casinos, discrimination followed. In the 1980s, according to a former Trump casino worker, Kip Brown, who was quoted by The New Yorker: “When Donald and Ivana came to the casino, the bosses would order all the black people off the floor. … They put us all in the back.”

In 1991, a book by John O’Donnell, who had been president of the Trump Plaza Hotel and Casino in Atlantic City, quoted Trump as criticizing a black accountant and saying: “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.” O’Donnell wrote that for months afterward, Trump pressed him to fire the black accountant, until the man resigned of his own accord.

Trump eventually denied making those comments. But in 1997 in a Playboy interview, he conceded “the stuff O’Donnell wrote about me is probably true.”

The recent record may be more familiar: Trump’s suggestions that President Obama was born in Kenya; his insinuations that Obama was admitted to Ivy League schools only because of affirmative action; his denunciations of Mexican immigrants as, “in many cases, criminals, drug dealers, rapists”; his calls for a temporary ban on Muslims entering the United States; his dismissal of an American-born judge of Mexican ancestry as a Mexican who cannot fairly hear his case; his reluctance to distance himself from the Ku Klux Klan in a television interview; his retweet of a graphic suggesting that 81 percent of white murder victims are killed by blacks (the actual figure is about 15 percent); and so on.

Trump has also retweeted messages from white supremacists or Nazi sympathizers, including two from an account called @WhiteGenocideTM with a photo of the American Nazi Party’s founder.

Trump repeatedly and vehemently denies any racism, and he has deleted some offensive tweets. The Daily Stormer, a neo-Nazi racist website that has endorsed Trump, sees that as going “full-wink-wink-wink.”

My view is that “racist” can be a loaded word, a conversation stopper more than a clarifier, and that we should be careful not to use it simply as an epithet. Moreover, Muslims and Latinos can be of any race, so some of those statements technically reflect not so much racism as bigotry. It’s also true that with any single statement, it is possible that Trump misspoke or was misconstrued.

And yet.

Here we have a man who for more than four decades has been repeatedly associated with racial discrimination or bigoted comments about minorities, some of them made on television for all to see. While any one episode may be ambiguous, what emerges over more than four decades is a narrative arc, a consistent pattern — and I don’t see what else to call it but racism.

Hellsangel wrote:Are you afraid he may kick you out, Comrade?

confuzzled dude wrote:

Hellsangel wrote:Are you afraid he may kick you out, Comrade?

I hope you realize the difference between wanting and having the ability [to do so]

Hellsangel wrote:

confuzzled dude wrote:

Hellsangel wrote:Are you afraid he may kick you out, Comrade?

I hope you realize the difference between wanting and having the ability [to do so]

Do you realize the difference between fear mongering and facts, Comrade? You seem to be intent on distributing the fear mongering koolaid that you have been drinking.

confuzzled dude wrote:

Hellsangel wrote:

confuzzled dude wrote:

Hellsangel wrote:Are you afraid he may kick you out, Comrade?

I hope you realize the difference between wanting and having the ability [to do so]

Do you realize the difference between fear mongering and facts, Comrade? You seem to be intent on distributing the fear mongering koolaid that you have been drinking.

Calling him racist is not catering to fear mongering rather exposing his bigotry.

MaxEntropy_Man wrote:Do bears shit in the woods?

Hellsangel wrote:

confuzzled dude wrote:

Hellsangel wrote:

confuzzled dude wrote:

Hellsangel wrote:Are you afraid he may kick you out, Comrade?

I hope you realize the difference between wanting and having the ability [to do so]

Do you realize the difference between fear mongering and facts, Comrade? You seem to be intent on distributing the fear mongering koolaid that you have been drinking.

Calling him racist is not catering to fear mongering rather exposing his bigotry.

Did you hear about the Indian American who pledged a million dollars to his campaign, Comrade? That doesn't sound like the pledge a racist would get from a minority. Except of course for fear mongering koolaid aficionados like you.

Hellsangel wrote:So North Indians are now racist, Comrade?

confuzzled dude wrote:

Hellsangel wrote:So North Indians are now racist, Comrade?

Don't the majority feel that they're superior to Madrasis because of their lighter skin (delusions of grandeur, of course). How do you describe this (Max Muller) kind  of attitude?

confuzzled dude wrote:

Hellsangel wrote:So North Indians are now racist, Comrade?

Don't the majority feel that they're superior to Madrasis because of their lighter skin (delusions of grandeur, of course). How do you describe this (Max Muller) kind  of attitude?

Hellsangel wrote:

MaxEntropy_Man wrote:Do bears shit in the woods?

Does Chicken Little yell the sky is falling, Il Professore?

60 police officers were killed.

343 firefighters were killed.

128 companies had employees that died in the collapse of the towers. Cantor Fitzgerald alone lost 658.

21,906 remains -- parts of human bodies -- were recovered.

1,609 people lost a spouse or partner. 3,051 children lost a parent.

But this is the number that struck me as I was looking at the list shortly after Donald Trump finished his acceptance speech at the Republican convention on Thursday: 20.

Twenty percent of Americans, this list says, knew someone who was hurt or killed in the September 11th attacks.

"Hurt" isn't defined, and it's safe to assume that some exaggeration was at play, since otherwise the statistic means that 57 million Americans knew someone hurt or killed in New York or in D.C. or in that field in Pennsylvania.

Trump said at one point. "Nearly 180,000 illegal immigrants with criminal records, ordered deported from our country, are tonight roaming free to threaten peaceful citizens," he said at another. "The attacks on our police, and the terrorism in our cities, threaten our very way of life," he said at another. The word "threat" was spoken eight times: You community is threatened, your peace is threatened, your very way of life is threatened

Hellsangel wrote:Sure. Let's go with the lefty Pravda on the Potomac's characterization, Comrade.

Hellsangel wrote:Please carry on with your chicken littlery, Comrade.

Modi, Trump, who else?

confuzzled dude wrote:

Hellsangel wrote:Please carry on with your chicken littlery, Comrade.

Modi, Trump, who else?

as opposed to your pearls of wisdom?

Hellsangel wrote:

confuzzled dude wrote:

Hellsangel wrote:Please carry on with your chicken littlery, Comrade.

Modi, Trump, who else?

as opposed to your pearls of wisdom?

We need some entertainment, Comrade. What is more fun than watching a Chicken Little Comrade screaming that the sky is falling? Carry on, Comrade.

confuzzled dude wrote:

Hellsangel wrote:

confuzzled dude wrote:

Hellsangel wrote:Please carry on with your chicken littlery, Comrade.

Modi, Trump, who else?

as opposed to your pearls of wisdom?

We need some entertainment, Comrade. What is more fun than watching a Chicken Little Comrade screaming that the sky is falling? Carry on, Comrade.

What's new? this is typical Republican trait; lying through their teeth with no shame whatsoever. It is your favorite leader that is screaming that the sky is falling and trying hard to paint a gloomy picture and you're attributing that to me. Again, who said "The attacks on our police, and the terrorism in our cities, threaten our very way of life"?