Donald Trump and his father, Fred, in 1973 at Trump Village in New York City.Barton Silverman/The New York Times
HAS the party of
Lincoln just nominated a racist to be president? We shouldn’t toss around such
accusations lightly, so I’ve looked back over more than 40 years of Donald
Trump’s career to see what the record says.
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; hisdenunciations 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 hasendorsed Trump,
sees that as going “full-wink-wink-wink.”
(Update: After this
column was published, the Trump campaign emailed me the following statement:
“Donald Trump has a lifetime record of inclusion and has publicly rebuked
groups who seek to discriminate against others on numerous occasions. To
suggest otherwise is a complete fabrication of the truth.”)
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.
Correction: July 25,
2016
An earlier version
of a caption that accompanied a photo of Donald J. Trump and his father
misidentified the borough where Trump Village is located. It is in Brooklyn,
not Queens.
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