Is Donald Trump a Racist? A serious question that deserves a serious answer.

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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.

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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.”

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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.

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Type: Discussion • Score: 4 • Views: 6,501 • Replies: 24

[+3] - RABEL222 - 07/06/2020Hell yes he is a proven racist sob.

@Robert Gentel,

I tend to think he is. You can rationalize most anything, even to yourself, so he might not really put it that way.

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If you judge him by his words, he certainly is. My one reservation is, he knows people see him that way and speaks like a racist anyway. He may be exaggerating some to get votes.

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@edgarblythe,

Good point, but if he's doing the racist talk, he's appealing to the racist vote. I would rather say racist than otherwise.

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@roger,

Exactly.

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@Robert Gentel,

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Is Donald Trump a Racist? A serious question that deserves a serious answer.

If it looks like a duck, quacks like a duck, and walks like a duck, then it's a duck. Yes, Donald Trump is EXTREMELY racist.

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@edgarblythe,

Honestly I initially thought he was merely playing to that crowd, but the historical stuff before the politics seems pretty damning to me. I'd known about the housing discrimination, but as the article explains perhaps that had been company policy inherited from his father, but some of the other things that this covered seem to pretty clearly indicate to me that he is a bit toward the racist side of the spectrum (like many things I don't see it as binary, and think we are all on the spectrum somewhere).

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I think he's a sociopath, he doesn't mind who he hurts and the damage he does just to get what he wants. He is more than willing to use race, gender, religion or anything else to his advantage.

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@izzythepush,

Trump is the first modern Republican to win the nomination based on racial prejudice

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Republicans have long been the party of racial conservatism. Since at least the 1960s, the GOP’s policies, rhetoric, and voters have been less supportive of minorities than have the Democrats’. These partisan differences over race have become especially pronounced during the Obama presidency.

But while white Republicans are more likely than white Democrats to express racially resentful beliefs, racial prejudice is thought to play a larger role in shaping the political preferences of liberals. In other words, racial politics has divided the Democratic Party’s diverse coalition more than it has splintered the overwhelmingly white Republican Party.
[...]
Donald Trump’s presidential campaign effectively bucked what the political scientists Donald Kinder and Lynn Sanders adroitly termed the Republican Party’s electoral temptation of race — using implicit racial appeals to win over racially conservative voters without appearing overtly racist. Trump’s play instead was to make several explicitly hostile statements about minority groups.

Trump has been willing to go where most Republican presidential candidates haven’t. That might have made anti-minority sentiments a more potent force in the 2016 GOP primaries than in primaries past. That’s plausible, because campaign appeals to racial and ethnic anxieties have often succeeded in activating support for politicians.
[...]
The party’s growing conservatism on matters of race and ethnicity provided fertile ground for Trump’s racial and ethnic appeals to resonate in the primaries. So much so, in fact, that Donald Trump is the first Republican in modern times to win the party’s presidential nomination on anti-minority sentiments.

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@Walter Hinteler,

I don't think he's an ideological racist, but he's quite happy to go along with idealogues like David Duke to further his own agenda

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@Robert Gentel,

Quote:

he is a bit toward the racist side of the spectrum (like many things I don't see it as binary, and think we are all on the spectrum somewhere).

It's admirable and even advisable to always attempt to be multi dimensional in one's analyses of human events. And I will even grant that there is a politically correct influence on the public discourse that perhaps draws people to conclude too hastily that someone's words or actions identify them as racist.

But seriously folks, if Donald Trump isn't a racist, who is?

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@Robert Gentel,

It might be more important to ask what he appears to be than what he actually is.

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@rosborne979,

I guess I'd wonder how you mean important. What he seems to be - the image he projects is important as far as persuading or dissuading people to vote for him. What he actually is, is important in that it will influence how he makes decisions if in office.

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@snood,

snood wrote:

I guess I'd wonder how you mean important. What he seems to be - the image he projects is important as far as persuading or dissuading people to vote for him. What he actually is, is important in that it will influence how he makes decisions if in office.

I agree with that, but I guess my implication was that the appearance itself may be all that we really need to know because the appearance carries with it the affects that we abhor.

We may never know what he actually feels. We may never know what any politician, or any other person actually feels or what motivates them, but we do know how they appear, and maybe that's what matters most.

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@Robert Gentel,

Robert Gentel wrote:

Honestly I initially thought he was merely playing to that crowd, but the historical stuff before the politics seems pretty damning to me. I'd known about the housing discrimination, but as the article explains perhaps that had been company policy inherited from his father, but some of the other things that this covered seem to pretty clearly indicate to me that he is a bit toward the racist side of the spectrum (like many things I don't see it as binary, and think we are all on the
spectrum somewhere).

I don't doubt that Trump is guilty as charged. I just think he is ramping it up, because he knows by experience what his public wants.

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@izzythepush,

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I don't think he's an ideological racist, but he's quite happy to go along with idealogues like David Duke to further his own agenda

I disagree. I believe Donald Trump is racist to his very core. Ideological or otherwise.

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@snood,

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But seriously folks, if Donald Trump isn't a racist, who is?

I agree with you completely. It seems like people are trying to come up with excuses and reasons for Donald Trump's racist behavior. How about the most obvious reason for his racist behavior. Donald Trump is acting like a racist because he actually is a racist. How is that for an excuse? This isn't complicated.

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@roger,

How Trump would put it is irrelevant to the meaning of the word "racist," and whether the shoe fits.

The King says "I love my peasants," but does he really?

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@rosborne979,

I think you're right. Without any certainty about what he actually feels, we know enough just from the way he presents himself.

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@InfraBlue,

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How Trump would put it is irrelevant to the meaning of the word "racist," and whether the shoe fits.

The King says "I love my peasants," but does he really?

That youtube video is really funny. That video truly is Donald Trump. That video sums up what Donald Trump is all about.

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Is Donald Trump a Racist? A serious question that deserves a serious answer.

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