When a Trumper Asks for Proof of Donny’s Racism, Here You Go

Donald Trump loves to claim that all the accusations that he is racist are unfounded and that he “has a great relationship with the Blacks.” He also claims he hasn’t “a racist bone in his body.”

Strangely, those are two phrases that non-racists probably never have to say. But the Trumpers want proof that he’s racist, so that’s what this column is. Proof.

Here are overt examples of Trump’s racism, so that the next time a Trump drooler demands proof of Trump racism, you can oblige.

Here are actual examples of Donald Trump being overtly racist:

Before he Ran for President, he Was a “Birther.”

Long before he decided to run for president and call Mexicans criminals and rapists, Trump questioned whether President Obama was born in the United States. In fact, Trump dobve fully into the whole “birtherism” movement, which was the racist conspiracy theory that President Barack Obama was an illegitimate president, not because he was Black, but because he wasn’t born in the United States, a nonsense charge by racists, most of whom knew better. In 2011, Trump claimed to have sent people to Hawaii to investigate whether Obama was really born there. As is his tendency, he turned the whole thing into a theatrical production, often claiming that the researchers “cannot believe what they are finding.”

Obama eventually released his long-form birth certificate and mocked Trump for being a moron during that year’s White House Correspondents’ Association dinner. Despite that, Trump continued to insinuate that the president was not born in the country. In a CPAC Conference speech in 2015, Trump was still insisting, “I don’t know where he was born.” (Of course, those of us who care abut the truth know Obama was born in 1961 in Hawaii. We’ve even all seen the contemporary north announcement.)

He attacked a couple of Gold Star parents

When Khizr Khan, the surviving father of deceased US Army Officer Humayun Khan, called Trump out for his anti-Muslim rhetoric and his outright disregard for basic constitutional rights — he even offered Trump his copy of the founding document, in case he might like to read it someday — Trump promptly attacked his wife.

Khan’s wife, Ghazala Khan, stood quietly next to her husband during his convention speech wearing an Abeyah, or Muslim head scarf. Trump immediately attacked the woman — he usually does — and insinuated that perhaps she was forbidden from speaking because she was Muslim. During an ABC News interview right after the Democratic Cnvention, Trump said, “If you look at his wife, she was standing there. She had nothing to say. She probably, maybe she wasn’t allowed to have anything to say. You tell me.”

Ghazala Khan was more gracious than she had to be. In an op-ed she penned for the Washington Post the following day, she explained that she could not speak because she was broken up with grief over her son. She wrote, “Walking onto the convention stage, with a huge picture of my son behind me, I could hardly control myself. What mother could? … Donald Trump has children whom he loves. Does he really need to wonder why I did not speak?”

Trump Has Been Sued Twice for Housing Discrimination Against Blacks

Back in 1973, as trump was acting as president of his father’s real estate company, the Trump Management Corporation, was sued by the Department of Justice for their tendency to discriminate against black people looking to rent apartments and condos they owned in Queens, Brooklyn and Staten Island. Trump and his family would quote different rents and lease terms to Black applicants and white applicants. Trump being Trump, he declared the allegations “totally ridiculous” and filed suit against the Justice Department, just a few months before he settled the suit and promised to never discriminate against black people, Puerto Ricans or other minorities.

Trump also agreed to send vacancy lists to the New York Urban League every week. He also allowed he Urban League to represent qualified minority applicants for vacancies in a number of Trump Properties.

However, three years later, the Justice Department once again sued Trump Management Corporation, this time for repeatedly black and minority applicants there were no vacancies when there were plenty.

Such racist practices didn’t stop when the DOJ went after trump for discrimination in renting. Over the years, workers at Trump’s casinos in Atlantic City have repeatedly accused him of racist practices over the years, to the point that the New Jersey Casino Control Commission fined the Trump Plaza Hotel and Casino $200,000 in 1992 because managers would remove African-American card dealers when a white high roller requested it.

Discrimination Has Been a Hallmark of Trump’s Entire Business Career

By all accounts from black Trump casino employees, those types of clearly racist practices were consistent with Trump’s behavior toward all black workers. In fact, whenever Donald Trump and his wife Ivana were expected to visit the Trump Castle casino, the bosses there knew it was best to get all of the Black workers off the floor and put them all in the back, out of sight.

Trump reportedly referred to his Black casino employees as “lazy,” according to a book by the former president of the trump Plaza Hotel and Casino, in a 1991 book.“I think the guy is lazy,” Trump said of a black employee, according to O’Donnell. “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.”

The book also recounts a telling story in which Trump disparaged his Black accountants as part of a two-fer of sorts. “And isn’t it funny,” Trump reportedly said. “I’ve got black accountants at Trump Castle and Trump Plaza. 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.”

According to the book, Trump was also reneging on commitments to hire black people in 1996, 20 Black workers in Indiana sued Trump for failing to honor his promise to hire mostly minority workers for a Trump riverboat casino on Lake Michigan.

Trump Has Repeatedly Refused to Say Anything Against White Nationalists and Nazis

Several times, Trump has refused to call out white supremacists and white nationalists. During the campaign, David Duke told his radio audience that voting for any candidate other than Trump is “really treason to your heritage.” When asked about that by Jake Tapper of CNN, Trump refused to condemn him. He also claimed he knew nothing about Duke or in general, and that he wouldn’t condemn a group he hadn’t yet researched.

Despite that, the very next day, Trump claimed that he actually did disavow Duke, and blamed a “lousy earpiece” for his not doing so on CNN. Strangely, however, the video of the exchange shows Trump responding quickly to the rest of Tapper’s questions, which means he seems to have been hearing everything he wanted to hear.

It’s impossible to believe that Trump knows nothing abut white nationalists and Nazis. He has been endorsed by the leading neo-Nazi news site, the Daily Stormer, and he has also received support from Richard Spencer, who serves director of the National Policy Institute, which exists to promote the “heritage, identity, and future of European people.” His candidacy was also endorsed by Jared Taylor, editor of American Renaissance, a Virginia-based white nationalist magazine, and Michael Hill, head of the League of the South, an Alabama-based white supremacist secessionist group. He has also received support from Brad Griffin, a member of League of the South and author of the popular white supremacist blog, “Hunter Wallace.”

The Trump campaign also proudly announced that one of its California primary delegates was William Johnson, who served as chair of the white nationalist American Freedom Party, although Johnson later withdrew and the Trump campaign claimed his inclusion was a mistake.

Trump Has a Tendency to Treat Ethnic Groups as Monoliths

Like a typical bigot, Donald Trump frequently responds to those who accuse him of racism by claiming he actually loves the ethnic group in question. Phrases like “I don’t have a racist bone in my body,” or “I love the Blacks” (or “the Hispanics” or the Muslims”) are both cringeworthy and demonstrate his sense of “others”-ness simultaneously.

They are also telling, in that they turn everyone in an ethnic or racial group into a monolith. They deny the diversity within each ethnic or racial group and treat them all as the same, at the same time he emphasizes their qualifications as “others.” This is Trump turning each racial and ethnic group into a simplified caricature; if you were to do the same with white people, Trump would likely complain mightily, as most racists do.

As an example, consider how Trump responded to the complaints abut his speech entering the race in 2015. As you’ll recall, he referred to Mexicans as rapists and criminals. And when Latinos rightly complained, his response came at a speech he gave at the southern border just weeks later, where he promised to “take jobs back from China (and) take jobs from Japan” and promising that “The Hispanics are going to get those jobs, and they’re going to love Trump.” (“The Hispanics,” get it?)

Trump Claimed he Couldn’t get a Fair Shake from a “Mexican Judge”

When Trump was facing judicial scrutiny over his enormously crooked Trump University, he claimed that Judge Gonzalo Curiel, who is an American of Mexican heritage, couldn’t rule fairly because Trump was planning to build a border wall. The bright orange man-child told CNN, “He’s a Mexican. … We’re building a wall between here and Mexico. The answer is, he is giving us very unfair rulings — rulings that people can’t even believe.”

Curiel was born in Indiana and is a citizen by birth. It should also be noted that the judge was a prosecutor in the 1990s, and in that capacity, he was a target for assassination based on his spotless record of putting away members of Mexican drug cartels.

Trump Doesn’t Just Attack Foreign Racists

Donald Trump doesn’t just attack race and “other-ism” when it comes to immigration. He has quite the history of attacking Native Americans, as well.

For example, back in 1993, Trump wanted to open a casino in Bridgeport, Connecticut; one that would compete with a casino owned by the local Mashantucket Pequot Nation. In a Congressional hearing before the House subcommittee on Native American Affairs, Trump said “they don’t look like Indians to me… They don’t look like Indians to Indians.” Years later, as a presidential candidate, Trump expounded on these remarks by suggesting that the mafia had infiltrated Indian casinos.

He Helped to Instigate the Railroading and Imprisonment of the Central Park 5

Way back in 1989, Trump took out full-page ads in four New York City-area newspapers. In those ads, he advocated for the return of the death penalty in New York and the expansion of police authority in response to the infamous “Central Park 5” a case in which a woman jogger was beaten and raped in Manhattan’s Central Park.

According to his ad, the five teenagers who were targeted by NYPD were apparently already guilty, since he wrote, “They should be forced to suffer and, when they kill, they should be executed for their crimes. I want to hate these murderers and I always will.” True to his word, he has repeated that sentiment. Trump still thinks the men are guilty, nearly two decades after all five teens were exonerated with DNA evidence in 2002 and after books and a long Netflix film showed the bias the NYPD and the prosecutors held in the case.

When Trump supporters beat up a Latino homeless man, Trump called the attackers “passionate.”

As everyone is aware, Trump has been the inspiration for many hate crimes. Even in news Zealand, he was cited as inspiration for the worst massacre in that country’s history, after which the Prime Minister and the entire government rose up and removed as many military-style weapons as they could tout of the hands of the general public; something Republicans and right wingers in general claim we can’t possibly do.

When two brothers were arrested for beating up a homeless Latino man in Boston during Trump’s campaign, when the police asked why they did it, they cited Trump’s anti-immigrant message when explaining why they did it. According to the police report, one of the men said, “Donald Trump was right ― all these illegals need to be deported.”

Rather than distance himself from such a horrible crime, Trump instead suggested that the men were passionate and well-intentioned, but that things had just gotten carried away. He said, “I will say that people who are following me are very passionate. They love this country and they want this country to be great again. They are passionate.”

During the campaign, Trump condoned and encouraged the beating of a Black Lives Matter protester

Trump supporters at a campaign rally in Alabama physically assaulted a Black protester when he began to chant, “Black lives matter.” According to video of the event, the Trumpers then continued kicking the man after he was already on the ground.

In an interview the next day, Trump suggested that the man’s attackers were justified. He said, “Maybe [the protester] should have been roughed up. It was absolutely disgusting what he was doing.” This is, of course, part of a wider pattern of instigating violence, primarily against people of color. In this case, however, the reason he egged on this incident was because he has a specific hatred of the entire Black Lives Matter movement. In a later interview published in the New York Times magazine, he described Ferguson, Missouri, as one of the most dangerous places in the United States, despite the fact that Ferguson has a lower violent crime rate in many red-state cities. He does the same thing with Chicago. If you were to listen to Trump and his regime, one would think Chicago was a veritable war zone, even though Chicago’s violent crime rate is no higher than many other cities, including some in Trump and the GOP’s beloved red states.

Those are just a few incidents demonstrating Trump’s intense racism. I actually have a lot more, so expect a part 2. When Republicans and other Trump apologists demand that you show them proof that Trump is racist, now you have a whole bunch of specific examples.

You’re welcome…

Originally published at The Pragmatic Progressive.