Fred Trump's Young Herr... A Racist? How Could It Be?

Yesterday, in his Washington Post column, Greg Sargent wrote that ever since Señor Trumpanzee "launched his candidacy by declaring Mexicans to be 'rapists,' Trump's public racism has often included two additional important elements: an adamant refusal to apologize for it in the face of outrage, and an equally adamant denial that the offending language was racist in any way. Central to Trump’s racism-- and more broadly to Trumpism writ large-- is not just the content of the racism itself. It’s also that he’s asserting the right to engage in public displays of racism without it being called out for what it is."

And he's dragging the Republican Party into the open pit sewer with him. Even the Republicans who have "condemned" his demented racist barrage against AOC, Ilhan Omar, Ayanna Pressley and Rashida Tlaib, have used words and phrases that show what they are really made of:

• Fred Upton (R-MI): "both sides"
• Susan Brooks (R-IN): "ALL...need to raise their level of civility"
• John Katko (R-NY): "vehemently criticized lawmakers on the far left"
• Elise Stefanik (R-NY): "strongly disagree w/ the tactics of the far left socialist Squad"

More typical was Long Island Trump supporter Lee Zeldin who wound up, like Lindsey Graham, denouncing the same 4 women of color for what he called a "blame America first mentality." But speaking of Long Island, another suburban swing-district member, this one a Democrat, Tom Suozzi-- vice chair of the Trump-oriented Problem Solvers Caucus-- just came back from a tour, not with Pence, of the concentration camps on the border. Watch this clip from Morning Joe, where he said he wants to be made an honorary member of "The Squad." Trump has united all the Democrats; too bad the Republicans are so much more reconciled to racism, xenophobia and bigotry than any Democrat. Tom did well-- now everybody in Congress in following Tom's idea to ask for membership in The Squad!




Even genuinely horrible New Jersey Blue Dog Josh Gottheimer, the single worst Democrat in Congress, couldn't quite bring himself to countenancing Trump's vile tweets:

So why are Republicans being such dicks about this? For one thing, Trump's racism polls well with Republicans-- although not so much with normal people. Trump has given left behind Republicans the OK to embrace racism-- and they have... in droves, even if some if them are too obtuse to realize it. Trump's net approval among Republicans rose by 5 percentage points to 72%, after his racist attack on four Democratic female lawmakers. His support among Democrats and Independents has dropped and his overall approval/disapproval remains at 41-55%. Steve Benen tried answering that dick question for the MaddowBlog yesterday (before the House voted). He began by quoting Eugene Robinson: "'Trump is a racist' does not exactly qualify as breaking news. But the silence from prominent Republicans is staggering-- and telling. It amounts to collaboration-- perhaps 'collusion' is a better word-- with the president’s assault on diversity and pluralism. In the coming campaign, you will hear Republican candidates at every level claim to be colorblind and embrace all Americans regardless of race or ethnicity. Do not believe them. Their failure to speak out now tells us everything we need to know about their true feelings."

Members like Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-KY) and House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy (R-CA) had an opportunity to stand up for core principles such as decency and respect, but by all appearances, they were simply too afraid to lead.

Their reticence served as a painful reminder: it really is Donald Trump’s party now.

In practice, Trump operates from the assumption that the key to electoral victory is maximizing racial resentments and reaping the benefits of some Americans’ worst and most divisive instincts. In effect, the president sees value in ripping the country apart, confident that he and people like him will be left with the biggest chunk.

Greg Sargent raised a related point yesterday that stood out for me:

As Jacob T. Levy observes, Trump’s repetition of racist and white nationalist tropes is laying waste to the norm, recently observed in both parties, according to which elites signal to white voters (at least nominally) that they should be better than our history.

In so doing, Levy notes, Trump is “changing what Republican voters think it means to be a Republican.” He’s changing their expectations of how Republican politicians should behave.

In that context, the reluctance of GOP lawmakers to condemn Trump’s latest racism becomes a lot more significant.

Quite right. It’s certainly true that many Republican leaders and high-profile members are afraid, not just of Trump’s ire-- note the president’s recent hysterics in response to Paul Ryan’s modest rebukes-- but of his followers and their expectations.

Party officials who believed they’d help set the party’s direction in the Trump era now realize that power is in the hands of one man: a hapless amateur whose rhetoric on race is too often indistinguishable from the angry, racist drunk at the end of the bar.

Republicans aware of their party’s demographic challenges-- the party is increasingly dependent on older white voters, in a nation that’s becoming increasingly diverse-- no doubt realize that Trump is making a risky electoral bet. But instead of pushing for a smarter strategy, most GOP leaders have effectively surrendered and accepted defeat.

The first time Trump was ever in the newspapers, it was because he had broken the law by refusing to rent apartments to people of color in buildings his father had financed with loans from the government that stipulated no racial discrimination would be tolerated. Did you listen to that song in the video up top? That's Ryan Harvey, Ani DiFranco and Tom Morello performing the long-lost Woody Guthrie song, "Old Man Trump." Guthrie had been a tenant at the notorious Beach Haven property in Brooklyn, a cesspool of racism back in the 1950s-- and the reason he wrote the song.

Fred Trump gave gave his son a lot of money and a lot of knowledge about building and selling. But, apparently, that isn't all he taught his young Herr. In 2016, before Trump won the GOP nomination, Will Kaufman wrote a piece for Quartz that shows the Trumpf family through the eyes of one of America's greatest songwriters: Woody Guthrie really did not like Donald Trump's racist dad. In December 1950, Guthrie rented an apartment from the Trumps.

Guthrie’s two-year tenancy in one of Fred Trump’s buildings and his relationship with the real estate mogul of New York’s outer boroughs produced some of Guthrie’s most bitter writings, which I discovered on a recent trip to the Woody Guthrie Archives in Tulsa. These writings have never before been published; they should be, for they clearly pit America’s national balladeer against the racist foundations of the Trump real estate empire.

Recalling these foundations becomes all the more relevant in the wake of the racially charged proclamations of Donald Trump, who last year announced, “My legacy has its roots in my father’s legacy.”

In the postwar years, with the return of hundreds of thousands of servicemen to New York, affordable public housing had become an urgent priority.

For the most part, low-cost housing projects had been left to cash-strapped state and city authorities. But when the Federal Housing Authority (FHA) finally stepped in to issue federal loans and subsidies for urban apartment blocks, one of the first developers in line, with his eye on the main chance, was Fred Trump. He made a fortune not only through the construction of public housing projects but also through collecting the rents on them.

When Guthrie first signed his lease, it’s unlikely that he was aware of the murky background to the construction of his new home, the massive public complex that Trump had dubbed “Beach Haven.”

Trump would be investigated by a U.S. Senate committee in 1954 for profiteering off of public contracts, not least by overestimating his Beach Haven building charges to the tune of $3.7 million.

What Guthrie discovered all too late was Trump’s enthusiastic embrace of the FHA’s guidelines for avoiding “inharmonious uses of housing”-- or as Trump biographer Gwenda Blair puts it, “a code phrase for selling homes in white areas to blacks.” As Blair points out, such “restrictive covenants” were common among FHA projects-- a betrayal, if ever there was one, of the New Deal vision that had given birth to the agency.

...For Guthrie, Fred Trump came to personify all the viciousness of the racist codes that continued to put decent housing-- both public and private-- out of reach for so many of his fellow citizens:

I suppose
Old Man Trump knows
Just how much
Racial Hate
he stirred up
In the bloodpot of human hearts
When he drawed
That color line
Here at his
Eighteen hundred family project...

And as if to leave no doubt over Trump’s personal culpability in perpetuating black Americans’ status as internal refugees-- strangers in their own strange land-- Guthrie reworked his signature Dust Bowl ballad "I Ain’t Got No Home" into a blistering broadside against his landlord:

Beach Haven ain't my home!
I just can't pay this rent!
My money's down the drain!
And my soul is sadly bent!
Beach Haven looks like heaven
Where no black ones come to roam!
No, no, no! Old Man Trump!
Old Beach Haven ain't my home!

In 1979, 12 years after Guthrie had succumbed to the death sentence of Huntington’s Disease, Village Voice reporter Wayne Barrett published a two-part exposé about Fred and Donald Trump’s real estate empire.

Barrett devoted substantial attention to the cases brought against the Trumps in 1973 and 1978 by the Civil Rights Division of the U.S. Justice Department. A major charge was that “racially discriminatory conduct by Trump agents” had “created a substantial impediment to the full enjoyment of equal opportunity.” The most damning evidence had come from Trump’s own employees. As Barrett summarizes:

According to court records, four superintendents or rental agents confirmed that applications sent to the central [Trump] office for acceptance or rejection were coded by race. Three doormen were told to discourage blacks who came seeking apartments when the manager was out, either by claiming no vacancies or hiking up the rents. A super said he was instructed to send black applicants to the central office but to accept white applications on site. Another rental agent said that Fred Trump had instructed him not to rent to blacks. Further, the agent said Trump wanted “to decrease the number of black tenants” already in the development “by encouraging them to locate housing elsewhere.”

Guthrie had written that white supremacists like the Trumps were “way ahead of God” because

God don't
know much
about any color lines.

Guthrie hardly meant this as a compliment. But the Trumps-- father and son alike-- might well have been arrogant enough to see it as one. After all, if you find yourself “way ahead of God” in any kind of a race, then what else must God be except, well, “a loser?” And we know what Donald Trump thinks about losers.

One thing is certain: Woody Guthrie had no time for "Old Man Trump."

We can only imagine what he would think of his heir.

More cheeseburgers, please by Chip Prosser

Now, imagine this: some people are just finding out Trump is a full-fledged racist this week... for the first time. Really! In fact... remember The Mooch? I do believe he's known Trump for decades and was, very briefly, even White House communication director for him. He says he's afraid Trumpanzee may be turning into a racist. "I don’t think the president is a racist. But here’s the thing, if you continue to say and act in that manner, then we all have to look at him and say, OK, well, maybe you weren’t a racist, but now you’re turning into one." Mooch, what's the cut-off point? How many times exactly?