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?

How Many Republican Politicians Are Ready To Lose Their Seats To Support Behavior By Trump They Hate?

A few days ago, the Cook Report published a piece by Amy Walter about the 2020 prospects of a Blue Wall, basically that "the 'easiest' or least risky electoral path for the Democratic nominee in 2020 is to reconstruct the so-called 'Blue Wall' in the industrial midwest. If the Democratic nominee wins every state Hillary Clinton carried in 2016, plus Wisconsin, Pennsylvania and Michigan, that Democrat would win 278 electoral votes-- eight more than the 270 needed to win. Just as important, it means that Democrats wouldn’t need to sweat Ohio or Florida. They can lose those big, electoral-vote-rich states, and still have enough to win the White House."

Good, especially if it causes Democratic Parry officials to realize that the party should never abandon the working class to go after the Wall Street class again. It didn't win Hillary a single state shouldn't have won anyway and it cost her Wisconsin, Michigan, Pennsylvania as well as any shot she may have had otherwise in Iowa, Ohio, Florida... perhaps Arizona and North Carolina as well. The party hierarchy is from the Wall Street class so they think that represents the party. That's the problem with the DCCC policy of ignoring candidates from the working class and keeping them out of "the club" as they did with IronStache (Randy Bryce). Walters doesn't gp anywhere near this stuff but she makes a point that's important to digest:

[I]f Iowa looks tough for Democrats, Michigan is looking pretty good. Trump carried the Wolverine state in 2016 by less than 11,000 votes. But, a recent WDIV/Detroit News poll finds Trump’s job approval in the state a bleak 38 percent favorable to 53 percent unfavorable. The Detroit Free Press’ Todd Spangler also highlights a key point: "General Motors has laid off thousands of employees counter to what Trump promised when he won in 2016.. and [h]e’s also running into trouble in terms of getting congressional approval for a new North American trade agreement to replace NAFTA, another key campaign promise that helped energize a base of white, working-class voters in Michigan at a time when Democratic enthusiasm seemed at a low point."

More ominously for the president, his job approval rating among independent voters in the state was just 43 percent, with 50 percent disapproving. EPIC/MRA pollster Bernie Porn, who founded the non-partisan Michigan-based polling firm more than 25 years ago, told me that even a motivated GOP base will get Trump, at best 43 percent of the vote. The rest needs to come from independents and/or disaffected Democrats.

But, but, but, didn’t all the polls in 2016 show Hillary winning the state? Why should we trust the polls now? It’s a fair question. The RealClear Politics average of Michigan polls gave Clinton a 3.5 percent advantage going into Election Day 2016. EPIC/MRA never showed Trump ahead in any of their polling. Their final pre-election poll had Clinton over Trump 42 percent to 38 percent.

EPIC/MRA’s pollster, Bernie Porn argues that polling didn’t pick up the tremendous gap in enthusiasm for Trump and lack thereof for Clinton. The results in Michigan in 2016, he told me in a recent interview, were “as much against Hillary Clinton as it was for Trump.”

Today, Porn and others argue that the enthusiasm gap that plagued Democrats in 2016 wasn’t there in 2018, and is not likely to be there in 2020 either. Unless, of course, Porn notes, "Democrats run a terrible candidate." An analysis of the 2018 vote in Michigan by the Detroit Free Press found that turnout in the state was “higher than other non-presidential election years going back decades. And that turnout was higher everywhere-- including rural areas and other areas where Trump did well. But the turnout was particularly notable in some big Democratic areas." In other words, Trump juicing his base only works if Democrats once again fail to be inspired to vote.

...Pennsylvania is another state where the polling was off in 2016. Pollsters in the Keystone state, like their colleagues in Michigan and Wisconsin, point to an underestimation of enthusiasm for Trump as a key factor in their miss.

In 2018, however, it was Democrats who enjoyed a solid enthusiasm advantage. Democratic Sen. Bob Casey crushed Clinton’s margins in the Philadelphia suburbs, while not losing as badly as Clinton did in the more rural/exurban parts of the state. For example, Clinton carried suburban Philadelphia’s Bucks County by just under 3,000 votes. Casey won it by 41,000. Meanwhile, while Trump carried York county in the southeastern part of the state by more than 60,000 votes in 2016, Republican Senate candidate Lou Barletta won there by just 26,000 votes.

Ambivalent voters who disliked both presidential nominees. Tepid enthusiasm from Democrats for their nominee. Tremendous support and energy from Republicans for theirs. Those were the three most important factors in Trump’s success in the three blue wall states. As we look to 2020, we know that Trump continues to enjoy solid support from his base, but the Democrats are at least equally energized to get out and vote against him. This leaves the battle for the 'ambivalent' voter as the most critical piece of the 2020 strategy. Trump has done little in his tenure in office to woo those not already in his base. The only question now is if Democrats will nominate a candidate who can appeal to these voters, or if they will choose a flawed candidate who will, once again, force these voters into having to decide between the "best-worst-choice."

Early this morning Scott Wong and Mike Lillis, reporting for The Hill, noted that Pelosi's office had sent out spreadsheets to Democratic members enumerating 400 wide-ranging local projects threatened by Trump’s decision to raid various budgets to build his vanity wall. The list includes locally important projects from maintenance facilities for F-35 stealth fighters at Eielson Air Force Base outside Fairbanks, Alaska and the operation of a middle school at Fort Campbell, Kentucky to funds to replace a training maze at Fort Bragg, North Carolina.

We have to smoke out as many Republicans as possible by making the case that projects in their backyard are in jeopardy and will likely be raided to help pay for Trump’s ineffective and politically motivated wall,” said a senior Democratic aide.

Key congressional Republicans, meanwhile, don’t need any nudge from Democrats. They’re already tearing themselves apart over Trump’s declaration.

“Congress has granted the executive branch certain spending authorities. I strongly object to any president acting outside of those explicit authorities to spend money that Congress has not appropriated for specific initiatives,” said Rep. Greg Walden, the House GOP’s former top campaigns chief and the only Republican in the Oregon delegation.

...Across the Capitol, GOP criticism of Trump’s executive move was even more scathing.

Sen. Lamar Alexander (R-TN), a former member of leadership and senior appropriator, lambasted Trump’s emergency declaration as “unnecessary, unwise and inconsistent with the U.S. Constitution.”

Sen. Thom Tillis (R-NC), a member of the Judiciary and Armed Services committees, warned that Trump was setting a horrible precedent that the next Democratic president could use to ram through “left-wing” policies.

A President Bernie Sanders, Tillis said, would declare a national emergency to implement the “radical Green New Deal,” while a President Cory Booker would declare an emergency on gun violence and end Second Amendment rights.

...Those GOP concerns aren’t necessarily unfounded. On Friday, Rep. Ilhan Omar (D-MN), a progressive freshman rabble rouser, tweeted that the next president “should declare a #NationalEmergency on day 1 to address the existential threat to all life on the planet posed by Climate Change.”

Gee, I hope everyone knows who Franco was

And yesterday, CNN reported that Republicans are paying a price for Trump's wall crusade. Good but... what price? Will McConnell, Cornyn and Perdue lose their Senate reelections? Will the Democrats hold all their 2018 gains and win another 50 seats, making the House GOP as relevant as a goldfish? Stephen Collinson's analysis led him to write that "A declaration of a national emergency to bypass Congress and reprogram funds already allocated by lawmakers would represent Trump's most striking assault yet on the system of constitutional order that he is sworn to preserve, protect and defend. If the move is not permanently blocked by the courts it could also come back to haunt Republicans, since it could provide a precedent for a future Democratic president to enact liberal priorities on an executive whim." Pelosi added, ominously "If the President can declare an emergency on something that he has created as an emergency, an illusion that he wants to convey, just think of what a president with different values can present to the American people." Could be gun control (an actual national emergency). Or something like the Green New Deal (an existential planetary emergency).

Trump's power grab yesterday is opposed by 66% of voters. During his entirely unconvincing Rose Garden presentation yesterday, he as much as admitted the whole phrase was just about 2020. "The only reason," he stupidly said into the microphone, "we are up here talking about this [the wall and fake national emergency] is because of the election." McTurtle must have nearly had a stroke or-- in CNN's parlance-- Trump's move "is likely to soon present politically dicey challenges for his fellow Republicans."

Pelosi is likely to invoke a clause in the 1976 National Emergencies Act that permits Congress to seek to terminate a President's declaration that McConnell appears to have no power to stop from coming to the floor in the Senate.

That will jam Republicans worried about the implications of presidential overreach but who will face a tough decision on whether to oppose Trump on the wall-- an issue that has an almost mystical hold on the GOP base.

It will represent yet another uncomfortable moment for a party that has often had to pick between its traditional conservative principles and standing with the barnstorming force-- Trump-- that has taken it over.

Usually, when it has been a dilemma between wielding or maintaining power and guarding principles by reining in Trump, the party has taken the first option.

A GOP senator who will face that choice again is John Cornyn of Texas, who told CNN this month that it was a "serious constitutional question" whether presidents can "usurp" the separation of powers and unilaterally dole out money.

Sen. Rand Paul, a Kentucky Republican who is sometimes a Trump ally, expressed deep reservations about the idea of an emergency declaration.

"I, too, want stronger border security, including a wall in some areas," Paul tweeted. "But how we do things matters. Over 1,000 pages dropped in the middle of the night and extraconstitutional executive actions are wrong, no matter which party does them."

Cornyn's up for reelection and a state that is slowly transitioning from red to purple. If the DSCC gets it wish and Beto runs against Cornyn, he could be in trouble trouble. What will a vote on stopping Trump mean for his reelection chances. If he votes to do that, independents will be more predisposed towards supporting him, but at a tremendous cost among Trumpified Republicans in the more backward, rural parts of the state that Cornyn needs to balance out the suburbanites who have finally freed themselves of the cult of Republican hive behavior. If he votes to let Trump do whatever he pleases regardless of the Constitution, he will activate moderate Republicans, independents and Democrats to commit to voting-- against him.

It's not just Cornyn who might see their seat in jeopardy over this. It will be a politically excruciating decision for Joni Ernst (R-IA), David Perdue (R-GA), Martha McSally (R-AZ), Cory Gardner (R-CO), Susan Collins (R-ME), Thom Tillis (NC)-- not to mention Doug Jones (D-AL).

And the House will have to vote too. It could be suicidal-- no matter what they decide to do other than hiding in the cloakroom-- for olde warhorses like Michael McCaul (R-TX), Kenny Marchant (R-TX), Fred Upton (R-MI), Peter King (R-NY) Scott Perry (R-PA), Steve Chabot (R-OH), Scott Tipton (R-CO), Ann Wagner (R-MO), Tim Walberg (R-MI), Rodney Davis (R-IL), Tom McClinton (R-CA), Vern Buchanan (R-FL)-- and even worse for less established members like Ross Spano (R-FL), Dan Crenshaw (R-TX), Chip Roy (R-TX), Don Bacon (R-NE), Jim Hagedorn (R-MN), Mike Bost (R-IL), Bryan Steil (R-WI), Brian Fitzpatrick (R-PA), Peter Stauber (R-MN)...

Trump's critics are warning that America's constitutional architecture is now in peril from a President who has never shown much interest in submitting to institutional checks on his power.

"Just because the President didn't get what he wanted-- a stupid wall to placate his rally-goers and his right-wing media chorus-- does not mean he alone can do whatever he wants," said Frank Sharry, executive director of America's Voice, a pro-immigration overhaul advocacy group. "This is about more than a political tactic. It's an attack on our democracy by an autocrat."

Pelosi and Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer said in a joint statement that declaring a national emergency would be a "lawless act, a gross abuse of the power of the presidency."

"The Congress will defend our constitutional authorities," they said.

But none of that is likely to matter to the President.

This showdown has demonstrated yet again that his own political interests come before any respect for constitutional norms or an awareness of how his actions will affect the political system itself when he has left office.

If that is painful for his own side-- in this case, Senate Republicans-- Trump seems not to care. The most attractive feature of a declaration of national emergency is that it allows him to escape a humiliating set of defeats in Washington and initiative a new controversy.

Even if the courts and Democrats in the Senate succeed in curtailing his behavior, the President can rail against their efforts in order to stir his political base as he embarks on his 2020 re-election race.

That will make clear what has always been the case-- Trump cares most about his base, and rarely dwells on who or what is caught in the crossfire.

Carl Hulse and Glenn Thrush, reporting for the NY Times this morning, noted that "The Republican resistance to Mr. Trump’s emergency declaration was much more pronounced in the Senate than in the House, where a few Republicans-- in the minority but more closely aligned to Mr. Trump-- groused. But most of the conservative rank and file embraced it." Remember, if the DCCC doesn't screw up recruitment, the Democrats can flip more House seats next year than they did last year. This kind of enabler approach McCarthy is leading the House Republicans into is, clear and simple, another loud and unmistakeable death knell for a party that deserves to die.