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 immediately condemn the white supremacists who advocated for him
Trump’s response to the Charlottesville chaos wasn’t the first time he appeared hesitant to condemn white supremacists.
Three times in a row on Feb. 28, Trump sidestepped opportunities to renounce white nationalist and
former KKK leader David Duke, who’d recently told his radio audience that voting for any candidate other than Trump would be “
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 did 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 didn’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 2015.
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 backed Trump
told a local TV reporter in May, “The reason a lot of Klan members like Donald Trump is because a lot of what he believes, we believe in.”
Later that month, 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.
After the election, Spencer’s National Policy Institute held a
celebratory gathering in
Washington, D.C. A video shows many of the white nationalists assembled
there doing the Nazi salute after Spencer declared, “
Hail Trump, hail our people, hail victory!”
He questioned whether President Barack Obama was born in the United States
Long
before calling Mexican immigrants “criminals” and “rapists,” Trump was a
leading proponent of “birtherism,” the racist conspiracy theory that
President Barack Obama was not born in the United States and is thus an
illegitimate president. Trump
claimed in 2011 to
have sent people to Hawaii to investigate whether Obama was really born
there. He insisted at the time that the researchers “cannot believe
what they are finding.”
Obama ultimately got the better of Trump, releasing his long-form birth certificate and
relentlessly mocking the real estate mogul about it at the White House Correspondents’ Association dinner that year.
But Trump continued to insinuate that the president was not born in the country.
“I don’t know where he was born,” Trump
said in a speech at the Conservative Political Action Conference in February 2015. (Again, for the record:
Obama was born in Hawaii.)
In September, under pressure to clarify his position, Trump
finally acknowledged that
Obama was indeed born in the United States. But he falsely tried to
blame Hillary Clinton for starting the rumors ― and tried to take credit
for settling them himself with his racist pressure campaign.
“Hillary Clinton and her campaign of 2008 started the birther controversy,” Trump said. “I finished it.”
He treats racial groups as monoliths
Like many racial instigators, Trump often answers accusations of bigotry by loudly protesting that he actually loves the
group in question. But that’s just as uncomfortable to hear, because
he’s still treating all the members of the group ― all the individual
human beings ― as essentially the same and interchangeable. Language is
telling, here: Virtually every time Trump mentions a minority group, he
uses the definite article the, as in “the Hispanics,” “the Muslims” and “the blacks.”
In
that sense, Trump’s defensive explanations are of a piece with his
slander of minorities. Both rely on essentializing racial and ethnic
groups, blurring them into simple, monolithic entities, instead of
acknowledging that there’s as much variety among Muslims and Latinos and
black people as there is among white people.
How did Trump respond to the outrage last year that followed his characterization of Mexican immigrants as
criminals and rapists?
“I’ll take jobs back from China, I’ll take jobs back from Japan,” Trump said
during his visit to the U.S.-Mexico border in July 2015. “The Hispanics are going to get those jobs, and they’re going to love Trump.”
The Hispanics are going to get those jobs, and they’re going to love Trump.
Donald Trump, July 2015
How did Trump respond to critics of his proposal to ban Muslims from entering the U.S.?
“I’m doing good for the Muslims,”
Trump told CNN last
December. “Many Muslim friends of mine are in agreement with me. They
say, ‘Donald, you brought something up to the fore that is so brilliant
and so fantastic.’”
Not
long before he called for a blanket ban on Muslims entering the
country, Trump was proclaiming his affection for “the Muslims,”
disagreeing with rival candidate Ben Carson’s claim in September 2015
that being a Muslim should disqualify someone from running for
president.
“I love the Muslims. I think they’re great people,”
Trump said then, insisting that he would be willing to name a Muslim to his presidential cabinet.
How
did Trump respond to the people who called him out for funding an
investigation into whether Obama was born in the United States?
“I have a great relationship with the blacks,”
Trump said in April 2011. “I’ve always had a great relationship with the blacks.”
Even
when Trump has dropped the definite article “the,” his attempts at
praising minority groups he has previously slandered have been
offensive.
Former Republican presidential candidate and Florida Gov. Jeb Bush (R) offered a
good summary of everything that was wrong with Trump’s comment.
“It’s like eating a watermelon and saying ‘I love African-Americans,’” Bush quipped.
In
an apparent attempt to win favor with black and Latino voters in the
final months of the campaign, Trump fell back on his penchant for
stereotyping. At the first presidential debate in September, Trump
claimed African-Americans and Latinos in cities were “
living in hell” due to the violence and poverty in their neighborhoods. The previous month, speaking to an audience of white people,
Trump asked “what the hell do [black voters] have to lose” by voting for him.
Trump’s treatment of longtime White House correspondent April Ryan during a
February press conference left many wondering if Trump assumes all black people are friends with one another.
When
Ryan, a black reporter for the American Urban Radio Networks, asked
Trump if he would hold meetings with members of the Congressional Black
Caucus to help craft his urban development policy, he asked her to
handle the introduction.
“Well, I would. I’ll tell you what,
do you want to set up the meeting?” Trump asked. “Do you want to set up the meeting? Are they friends of yours?”
“No, I’m just a reporter,” Ryan replied.
He trashed Native Americans, too
In
1993, Trump wanted to open a casino in Bridgeport, Connecticut, that
would compete with one owned by the Mashantucket Pequot Nation, a local
Native American tribe. He
told the House subcommittee on Native American Affairs that the Pequots “don’t look like Indians to me... They don’t look like Indians to Indians.”
Trump
then elaborated on those remarks, which were unearthed last year in the
Hartford Courant, by claiming ― with no evidence ― that
the mafia had infiltrated Native American casinos.
He encouraged the mob anger that resulted in the wrongful imprisonment of the Central Park Five
In 1989, Trump took out
full-page ads in
four New York City-area newspapers calling for the return of the death
penalty in New York and the expansion of police authority in response to
the infamous case of a woman who was beaten and raped while jogging in
Manhattan’s Central Park.
“They
should be forced to suffer and, when they kill, they should be executed
for their crimes,” Trump wrote, referring to the Central Park attackers
and other violent criminals. “I want to hate these murderers and I
always will.”
The
public outrage over the Central Park jogger rape, at a time when the
city was struggling with high crime, led to the wrongful conviction of
five teenagers of color known as the Central Park Five.
The men’s convictions were overturned in 2002, after they’d already spent
years in prison, when
DNA evidence showed they did not commit the crime. Today, their case is
considered a cautionary tale about a politicized criminal justice
process.
Trump, however,
still thinks the men are guilty.
He condoned the beating of a Black Lives Matter protester
At a November 2015 campaign rally in Alabama, Trump supporters
physically attacked an
African-American protester after the man began chanting “Black lives
matter.” Video of the incident shows the assailants kicking the man
after he has already fallen to the ground.
The following day, Trump
implied that the attackers were justified.
“Maybe [the protester] should have been roughed up,” he mused. “It was absolutely disgusting what he was doing.”
Trump’s dismissive attitude toward the protester is part of a
larger, troubling pattern of instigating violence toward protesters at campaign events, where people of color have attracted
especially vicious hostility.
Trump has also indicated he believes the entire Black Lives Matter movement lacks
legitimate policy grievances. He alluded to these views in an interview with The New York Times Magazine where he
described Ferguson, Missouri,
as one of the most dangerous places in America. The small St. Louis
suburb is not even in the top 20 highest-crime municipalities in the
country.
He called supporters who beat up a homeless Latino man “passionate”
Trump’s racial incitement has already inspired hate crimes. Two brothers
arrested in
Boston in August 2015 for beating up a homeless Latino man cited
Trump’s anti-immigrant message when explaining why they did it.
“Donald Trump was right ― all these illegals need to be deported,” one of the men reportedly
told police officers.
Trump
did not even bother to distance himself from them. Instead, he
suggested that the men were well-intentioned and had simply gotten
carried away.
“I
will say that people who are following me are very passionate,” Trump
said. “They love this country and they want this country to be great
again. They are passionate.”
He stereotyped Jews and shared an anti-Semitic image created by white supremacists
When
Trump addressed the Republican Jewish Coalition last December, he tried
to relate to the crowd by invoking the stereotype of Jews as talented
and cunning businesspeople.
“I’m a negotiator, like you folks,”
Trump told the crowd, touting his 1987 book
Trump: The Art of the Deal.
“Is there anyone who doesn’t renegotiate deals in this room?” Trump said. “Perhaps more than any room I’ve spoken to.”
Nor
was that the most offensive thing Trump told his Jewish audience. He
implied that he had little chance of earning the Jewish Republican
group’s support, because his fealty could not be bought with campaign
donations.
“You’re not going to support me, because I don’t want your money,” he said. “You want to control your own politician.”
Ironically, Trump has many close Jewish family members. His daughter Ivanka
converted to Judaism in 2009 before marrying the real estate mogul Jared Kushner. Trump and Kushner raise their three children in an observant Jewish home.
In July, Trump
tweeted an anti-Semitic image that
featured a photo of Hillary Clinton over a backdrop of $100 bills with a
six-pointed star next to her face and the label “Most Corrupt Candidate
Ever!”
“Crooked Hillary - - Makes History!” Trump wrote in the tweet.
The
religious symbol was co-opted by the Nazis during World War II when
they forced Jews to sew it onto their clothing. Using the symbol over a
pile of money is blatantly anti-Semitic and re-enforces hateful
stereotypes of Jewish greed.
“The
sheriff’s badge ― which is available under Microsoft’s ‘shapes’ ― fit
with the theme of corrupt Hillary and that is why I selected it,” he
said in a statement.
Mic,
however, discovered that the image was actually created by white
supremacists and had appeared on a neo-Nazi forum more than a week
before Trump shared it. Additionally, a watermark on the image led to a
Twitter account that regularly tweeted racist and sexist political
memes.
He treats African-American supporters as tokens to dispel the idea he is racist
At a campaign appearance in California in June, Trump boasted that he had a black supporter in the crowd, saying, “
Look at my African-American over here.”
“Look at him,” Trump continued. “Are you the greatest?”
Trump went on to imply that the media conceals his popularity among black voters by not covering the crowd more attentively.
“We have tremendous African-American support,” he said. “The reason is I’m going to bring jobs back to our country.”
Ultimately, Trump won just
8 percent of the African-American vote, according to the NBC News exit poll.
It
may not be surprising that Trump brought so much racial animus into the
2016 election cycle, given his family history. His father, Fred Trump,
was a target of folk singer Woody Guthrie’s lyrics after
Guthrie lived for two years in a building owned by Trump
père: “I suppose / Old Man Trump knows / Just how much / Racial hate / He stirred up / In the bloodpot of human hearts.”
And last fall, a news report from 1927 surfaced on the site Boing Boing, revealing that
Fred Trump was arrested that
year following a KKK riot in Queens. It’s not clear exactly what the
elder Trump was doing there or what role he may have played in the riot.
Donald Trump, for his part, has
categorically denied (except when he’s
ambiguously denied) that anything of the sort ever happened.
