Trump Has Been Demonstrably Racist For His Whole Life. Does That Mean His Supporters Are Too?

The chart above is from a new Civiqs poll of Trump's favorable/unfavorable ratings by race. Its disappointing that 54% of white people have a positive opinion and surprising that 6% of African Americans do. But, for me the most shocking number is that 27% of Latinos have a favorable opinion of this sack of shit. How is that possible? Who are those 27%? They can't all be old and hate-filled racist Castro-era Cubans. I mean that might be 6 or 7%, not 27%. Ever hear the Woody Guthrie song, "Old Man Trump?" This is a recoded version by Ryan Harvey, Ani DiFranco and Tom Morello:





Guthrie was a resident of the Trump project Beach Haven down the street from where my childhood girlfriend lived. Guthrie hated everything about it-- especially the racism.

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

The first time Trump made it into the newspapers was when he was caught by the Feds violating the law about discriminating against Blacks and Puerto Ricans seeking to rent apartments there. A little background: Post-WWII Federal Housing Authority (FHA) loans and subsidies for urban apartments, for which Trump's neo-Nazi/KKK father, Fred Trump availed himself, came with a stipulation: no racial discrimination allowed. The Trumps made a fortune not only through the construction of public housing projects but also through collecting the rents on them. In 1979, 12 years after Guthrie's death, Village Voice reporter Wayne Barrett published an exposé about the Trumpanzee real estate empire, devoting 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.”

Just last week, a team of reporters from The Atlantic noted that "The first quotation from Donald Trump ever to appear in the New York Times came on October 16, 1973. Trump was responding to charges filed by the Justice Department alleging racial bias at his family’s real-estate company. 'They are absolutely ridiculous,' Trump said of the charges. 'We have never discriminated, and we never would.'" So... his very first appearance in The Times was a lie.

In the years since then, Trump has assembled a long record of comment on issues involving African Americans as well as Mexicans, Hispanics more broadly, Native Americans, Muslims, Jews, immigrants, women, and people with disabilities. His statements have been reflected in his behavior-- from public acts (placing ads calling for the execution of five young black and Latino men accused of rape, who were later shown to be innocent) to private preferences (“When Donald and Ivana came to the casino, the bosses would order all the black people off the floor,” a former employee of Trump’s Castle, in Atlantic City, New Jersey, told a writer for the New Yorker). Trump emerged as a political force owing to his full-throated embrace of “birtherism,” the false charge that the nation’s first black president, Barack Obama, was not born in the United States. His presidential campaign was fueled by nativist sentiment directed at nonwhite immigrants, and he proposed barring Muslims from entering the country. In 2016, Trump described himself to the Washington Post as “the least racist person that you’ve ever encountered.”

Although no one else may, Señor Trumpanzee, according to the Washington Post's Philip Rucker and Ashley Parker, "considers himself a branding wizard, but he is vexed by a branding crisis of his own: how to shed the label of 'racist.' As the campaign takes shape about 15 months before voters render a verdict on his presidency, Trump’s Democratic challengers are marking him a racist, and a few have gone so far as to designate him a white supremacist. Throughout his career as a real estate magnate, a celebrity provocateur and a politician, Mr Trump has recoiled from being called the r-word, even though some of his actions and words have been plainly racist. Following a month in which he levelled racist attacks on four congresswomen of colour, maligned majority-black Baltimore as a "rat and rodent infested mess" and saw his anti-immigrant rhetoric parroted in an alleged mass shooter's statement, the risk for Mr Trump is that the pejorative that has long dogged him becomes defining."

Being called a racist has led Trump in recent days to lash out-- in tweets and in public comments-- behavior his advisers and allies explain as the natural reaction of anyone who does not consider himself a racist but is accused of being one.

"For them to throw out the race word again-- racist, racist, racist," Mr Trump told reporters Friday as he departed the White House for a week-long vacation at his private golf club in Bedminster, New Jersey. "They call anybody a racist when they run out of cards."

The president views the characterisation largely through the lens of politics, said one close adviser, explaining that Trump feels the charges of racism are just another attempt to discredit him-- not unlike, he believes, the more than a dozen women who have accused him of sexual misconduct or the Russia investigation.

Many of his supporters see it the same way. "At first, they tried to use Russia, and that didn't work," said Don Byrd of Newton, Iowa. "Now it's all about race-- 'He's a racist. He's this. He's that.'"

Democrats have engaged in semantic manoeuverings about just how racist they think the president is. While former congressman Beto O'Rourke and Sen. Elizabeth Warren of Massachusetts said without hesitation that the president is a white supremacist, former Vice President Joe Biden stopped short.

"Why are you so hooked on that?" Mr Biden told reporters last week in Iowa. "You just want me to say the words so I sound like everybody else. I'm not everybody else. I'm Joe Biden... He is encouraging white supremacists. You can determine what that means."

Biden might not what to go there because his 5 decades in politics makes it clear that he may not be as racist as Trump, but that he certainly used racism as a tool right from the start... even if he backed off once Obama picked him to be VP. When Trump calls himself "the least racist person anywhere in the world"-- despite his racist history-- he is signaling that if Biden is the Democratic nominee (God forbid), he will fight fire with fire when it comes to racism.

"The Discovery" Revisited 2019... with apologies to Norman Rockwell by Nancy Ohanian

Trump's sensitivity about the racist sobriquet dates back decades. Al Sharpton, a civil rights activist who has known Trump and tangled with him for many years, said the president has long understood that being called "the r-word" would damage his casino and hotel businesses and, now, his political standing.

"At one level, you're super sensitive about the r-word, and on another level, you buy ads on the Central Park Five," he said.

Mr Sharpton recalled that, at the height of the birtherism debate, Mr Trump sought to persuade him to stop calling him out for his lies about Mr Obama's birthplace on his MSNBC show by inviting him to a meeting at Trump Tower.

"I'm not a racist," he recalled Mr Trump adamantly insisting.

The two men argued and Mr Sharpton responded, "I'm not calling you a racist, but what you are doing is racist."

Mr Sharpton continued to attack Trump on air.

Some people who have worked for Trump say the president is less concerned about the moral significance of being called a racist but focuses instead on the bottom-line implications.

"The guy sends out blatantly racist tweets," former White House communications director Anthony Scaramucci said. "White supremacist. Racist. Those labels are bad for business... It means a reduction in the colours of people who want to vote for you. He's upset about it because it's bad for business."

To the extent that one's understanding of what is and isn't racist is forged in his youth, Trump's upbringing may be instructive. One former adviser suggested Trump believes he is more racially tolerant than his father, Fred Trump, who was reported to have been arrested in connection with a 1927 Ku Klux Klan march in New York-- an arrest the president has denied as "nonsense" and "never happened." In the 1970s, Fred and Donald Trump were both sued by the Justice Department for discriminating against black renters in their residential properties.

Ms Conway argued the charges of racism against Trump are over the top and that they are likely to help him politically because his voters could think Democratic candidates are unfairly branding them as racists, too, simply for supporting the president.

"When the elite wrist-flickers are out there demeaning and ridiculing his rank-and-file supporters-- those forgotten men and women who aren't chanting at the rallies-- an insult to him is an insult to them and vice versa," Ms Conway said.

Also from Ashley Parker, this time with another Washington Post reporter, Toluse Olorunnipa, is a report about how Trump is dialing up the culture wars as a form of typical right-wing divisiveness to keep the working class from looking at actual policy. "From straws to wind turbines to socially conservative issues, Trump is deliberately amplifying public tensions by seizing on divisive topics to energize his base, according to campaign aides and White House advisers. The president is following much the same strategy that he pursued in 2016-- inserting himself into the issues his supporters are already discussing, and using blunt us-against-them language without regard to nuance or political correctness. As Democrats debate policy, Trump has sought to force his potential rivals to defend the most far-reaching cultural ideas circulating within their party. While Trump’s campaign aides [including Fox News hosts] have proactively pushed his politically incorrect message with creative and at times tongue-in-cheek marketing, the president has caught some of his advisers off guard by crudely inflaming culture wars on heavier topics such as race, abortion and immigration.

Like much of what Trump does, the strategy of inflaming the culture wars carries significant risks. Democrats say the president is writing off much of the country and giving some of the voters who stayed home in 2016 a reason to vote against him. Some 2020 candidates have specifically sought to portray Trump's constant agitation of political, cultural and racial divisions as too exhausting for the country.

Sen. Kamala Harris (D-CA) contrasted her presidential campaign with Trump's by saying that voters want a political message "about lifting people up and not beating them down."

"People are just tired of what we've been seeing," she told reporters earlier this month in Detroit. "It is tiring."

And after two mass shootings earlier this month-- including one authorities believe may have been inspired by anti-immigrant racism-- Democrats say Trump's unwillingness to play the traditional presidential role of national healer and bipartisan problem-solver has been laid bare.

"We have a president who has aligned himself with the darkest forces in this nation," former vice president Joe Biden said Wednesday. "And that makes winning the battle for the soul of this nation that much harder."

Trump disparaged Biden on a day the president had set aside for visiting victims of the shootings that killed 31 people in El Paso and Dayton, Ohio.

"Watching Sleepy Joe Biden making a speech," Trump tweeted from Air Force One as he traveled between the grieving communities. "Sooo Boring!"

One more Post piece to thread this needle, this one by Julie Zauzmer about why Evangelicals are still so happy with Trump. She wrote that in 2016 he was overwhelmingly supported by them-- more so than George W. Bush, John McCain or Mitt Romney and that now, according to Pew, "almost 70% percent of white evangelicals approve of Trump’s performance in office. They may be stupid, they may be racist, they may be deranged but the Trump Evangelicals say they see is an odds with what normal people see. For them, he's "a president who sees America like they do, a menacing place where white Christians feel mocked and threatened for their beliefs. A president who’s against abortion and gay rights and who has the economy humming to boot."

A few of them may may chafe at his his blasphemy, but they've all sold their souls to him. Religionist charlatans, commercial Christian frauds, have sold them on Trump and "using coarse language is far from the president’s only behavior that might turn off the religious right. He’s been divorced twice and has faced constant allegations of extramarital affairs. He previously supported abortion rights, and he has stumbled when trying to discuss the specifics of his religious beliefs, once referring to a book in the Bible as 'Two Corinthians' instead of Second Corinthians. Yet to this point, Trump has maintained broad support from evangelicals, including the unwavering backing of some prominent conservative Christian leaders... They agree with his social policies, praise his appointment of conservative judges and extol his commitment to Israel-- often tolerating Trump’s character flaws for the continued advancement of all three."