If you ask President Trump, he isn’t racist. To the contrary, he’s repeatedly said that he’s “the least racist person that you’ve ever encountered.”
Trump’s actual record, however, tells a very different story.
Just this week Trump was quick to call out actor Jesse Smollett on Twitter:
.@JussieSmollett – what about MAGA and the tens of millions of people you insulted with your racist and dangerous comments!? #MAGA
— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) February 21, 2019
He was quick to mention “racist and dangerous comments” about an actor, but on the same day tweeted nothing about U.S. Coast Guard lieutenant and self-identified white nationalist Christopher Paul Hasson.
Hasson was arrested after federal investigators uncovered a cache of weapons and ammunition in his Maryland home that authorities say he stockpiled to launch a widespread domestic terrorist attack targeting politicians and journalists.
Trump’s reply to this news?
No tweet. No statement. Nothing.
A day later he told reporters it was “a shame.”
A shame?
None of this is surprising.
On the campaign trail, Trump repeatedly made explicitly racist and otherwise bigoted remarks, from calling Mexican immigrants criminals and rapists to proposing a ban on all Muslims entering the US to suggesting a judge should recuse himself from a case solely because of the judge’s Mexican heritage.
The trend has continued into his presidency.
From stereotyping a black reporter to pandering to white supremacists after they held a violent rally in Charlottesville, Virginia, to cracking a joke about the Trail of Tears, Trump hasn’t stopped.
In fact, the very first time that Trump appeared in the pages of the New York Times, back in the 1970s, was when the US Department of Justice sued him for racial discrimination.
Since then, he has repeatedly appeared in newspaper pages across the world as he inspired more similar controversies.
This is not a man who is going to miss an opportunity to slam a gay African American man, while remaining dead quiet on a white supremacist who had wanted to murder some Democrats and journalists.
So it’s no wonder most Americans believe race is a big problem in Trump’s America.
According to research from YouGov Omnibus, more than seven in ten (71%) people say that racism is still a serious problem in the US.
African Americans (85%) are especially likely to believe this, while 68% of whites agree.
But Trump voters are split on this statement: 49% agree racism is still a serious issue while 48% disagree.
The media often falls back on euphemisms when describing Trump’s comments about race: racially loaded, racially charged, racially tinged, racially sensitive.
But here’s the truth: Donald Trump is a racist.
He talks about and treats people differently based on their race.
He has done so for years, and he is still doing so.
Need any evidence?
- Trump’s real-estate company tried to avoid renting apartments to African-Americans in the 1970s and gave preferential treatment to whites, according to the federal government.
- Trump treated black employees at his casinos differently from whites. A former hotel executive said Trump criticized a black accountant: “Black guys counting my money! I hate it. … I think that the guy is lazy. And it’s probably not his fault, because laziness is a trait in blacks.”
- In 1989, Trump took out ads in New York newspapers urging the death penalty for five black and Latino teenagers accused of raping a white woman in Central Park; he argued they were guilty as late as October 2016, more than 10 years after DNA evidence had exonerated them.
- He began his 2016 presidential campaign with a speech disparaging Mexican immigrants as criminals and “rapists.”
- Trump once referred to a Hispanic Miss Universe as “Miss Housekeeping.”
- In December 2015, Trump called for a “a total and complete shutdown of Muslims entering the United States,” including refusing to readmit Muslim-American citizens who were outside of the country at the time.
- Trump said a federal judge hearing a case about Trump University was biased because of the judge’s Mexican heritage.
- Trump has trafficked in anti-Semitic caricatures, including the tweeting of a six-pointed star alongside a pile of cash.
- He has also been reluctant to condemn anti-Semitic attacks on journalists from his supporters, and he echoed neo-Nazi conspiracy theories.
- In June 2017, Trump said 15,000 recent immigrants from Haiti “all have AIDS” and that 40,000 Nigerians, once seeing the United States, would never “go back to their huts” in Africa.
- He spent years suggesting that the nation’s first black president was born not in the United States but in Kenya, a lie that Trump still has not acknowledged as such.
- He frequently offers false crime statistics to exaggerate urban crime, including about Oakland, Philadelphia and Ferguson, Mo.
- He frequently criticizes prominent African-Americans for being unpatriotic, ungrateful and disrespectful.
- He called Puerto Ricans who criticized his administration’s response to Hurricane Maria “politically motivated ingrates.”
- He remained quiet when another Coast Guard member was suspended after flashing a white supremacy sign during a live TV report.
- He called some of those who marched alongside white supremacists in Charlottesville, Va., last August “very fine people.”
- He has retweeted white nationalists without apology.
Longtime Trump lawyer and fixer Michael Cohen says his former boss used racist language and attacked countries with black leader as “shitholes.”
In just one example Cohen described how he told Trump during the 2016 election that one of his rally crowds was mostly white.
“I told Trump that the rally looked vanilla on television,” said Cohen. “Trump responded, ‘That’s because black people are too stupid to vote for me.'”
Former White House aide Omarosa Manigault Newman, says there is no doubt in her mind that her former boss is a racist.
“It is very clear Donald Trump is a racist and he’s trying to undermine our democracy,” Manigault Newman said. “The things that Donald Trump has done. The way he toys with race. The way he’s trying to incite a race war. It is not funny.”
It’s a shame.