Trump's Racism Isn't News
Donald Trump’s racist meme featuring Barack and Michelle Obama is shocking but utterly unsurprising. Trump has been a racist for decades—following in his father’s footsteps.
In 1971, Trump joined the real estate company founded by daddy Fred, and, in a move that every nepo baby would applaud, assumed the entry-level position of president.
His career as his father’s junior partner got off to an inauspicious but telling start.
In 1973, the U.S. Department of Justice sued Trump Management for discriminating against prospective Black tenants, naming both Trumps as codefendants. “Major Landlord Accused of Antiblack Bias in City,” read the headline heralding Donald J. Trump’s first appearance on page one of the New York Times.
Countersuing, the Trumps unleashed their lawyer, Roy Cohn, the disgraced (and, eventually, disbarred) former aide to Senator Joseph McCarthy. Cohn advanced the Trumps’ claim that they were discriminating not against Blacks but against undesirable “welfare recipients.” A judge dismissed the Trumps’ countersuit. (The tradition of judges tossing baseless Trump lawsuits continues to this day.)
Trump’s career in white supremacy, however, was just getting going.
In 1989, Trump appeared in the Times again, spending $85,000 to run a full-page ad in which he demanded the death penalty for the “Central Park Five,” five black and brown young men falsely accused of attacking a Manhattan jogger.
“I want to hate these muggers and murderers,” Trump wrote in the Times ad. “They should be forced to suffer and, when they kill, they should be executed for their crimes.” Trump’s ad helped convict the innocent men, who, having lost much of their youth in prison before a serial rapist confessed to the attack, now call themselves the “Exonerated Five.”
Trump has never apologized for taking out the ad, just as he has refused to say he’s sorry for posting the meme about the Obamas. Instead, facing the fury of both Republicans and Democrats, he blamed it on a “staffer” and took it down.
It’s not enough for Trump to remove a racist video. Trump needs to be removed from the White House.
Meanwhile, this is the meme of the Obamas I’m sharing. I hope you’ll join me.
In other news: BAD BUNNY FOR PRESIDENT
It’s absolutely disgusting, disgraceful. My dearest young friend, a black man, was so impacted this week, that he had to close himself off in his office to regain his composure. Not because of the meme, as you said, Trump has been racist for years, but because “no one is doing anything to stop him”. My heart just breaks for him, over this entire dismantling of our country’s ethics, values, and decency.