Trump’s rash, racist rush to judgment
And no apology
This Tuesday, when New Yorkers of both parties choose nominees for President, marks 27 years to the day since a young white woman was brutally raped and left for dead while jogging in Central Park. Within days, police announced that five black and Latino teenagers had confessed to the rape, and headlines splashed across the pages of the papers condemned them. “WILDING,” the New York Post’s front page read, “A new term for terror in a city that lives in fear,” and this paper’s first headline read: “WOLF PACK’S PREY.” The teenagers were described as savage and bestial.
Not quite two weeks later, bombastic real estate mogul Donald Trump spent $85,000 to place sensational full-page ads in each of the city’s daily newspapers. In large capital letters, it screamed: “BRING BACK THE DEATH PENALTY. BRING BACK OUR POLICE!” In the paragraphs below, Trump lamented “the complete breakdown of life as we knew it” in New York City.
He blamed excessive respect for civil liberties and “pandering to the criminal population” for having hogtied the police force. “Unshackle (the police) from the constant chant of ‘police brutality,’ ” he demanded.
But the ad was not just a call for politicians to be tougher on crime. Trump made plain that what he really wanted was revenge. “I want to hate these muggers and murderers. They should be forced to suffer and, when they kill, they should be executed for their crimes.”
In his brazen rush to judgment, Trump ignored the fact that the Supreme Court had already forbidden the death penalty for rape, and that as juveniles, the teenagers could not have been sentenced to death.
His calls for vengeance were especially reckless because the Central Park Five were, in fact, innocent. Their “confessions” had been riddled with inconsistencies and inaccuracies, and in 2002 the convictions were vacated with the support of the Manhattan district attorney’s office after the true perpetrator came forward and DNA evidence proved his claims.
Even if it’s understandable that Trump was certain of their guilt — few doubted it then — the fact that he used his platform and spent more money than most New Yorkers made in a year to place the ads speaks to his character.
Death as a punishment for rape has historically been reserved for a particular type of accusation: the rape of a white woman by a black man. These executions were frequently carried out not by the justice system but by extralegal gangs known as lynch mobs. Trump, in presuming to speak for the citizens of the city through his newspaper ad, helped to incite the anger and hatred toward the Central Park Five that led to their ultimate convictions, despite no evidence against them other than their massively flawed, coerced statements.
As we’ve seen throughout his current presidential campaign, Trump — the man who took 24 hours to decide whether he would disavow the support of a former Ku Klux Klan leader — is less concerned with facts and specifics than with fomenting a similar hatred towards minorities, women and immigrants.
When the City of New York settled with the Five for $41 million in 2014, Trump, still unwilling to admit that he got it wrong, railed against the settlement. “These young men do not exactly have the pasts of angels,” he told the Daily News. None of the five had ever been arrested or accused of any crime before then, and though they were with a larger group of teenagers who had been in the park that night, they were not the leaders of that group, who committed other, lesser crimes and served short sentences.
Trump’s belief that there is nothing wrong with the Central Park Five spending their adolescences in prison demonstrates his racist assumption that all black and brown men must have been or will in the future be criminals.
We should all have grave concerns about Republicans nominating a man who to this day choses hatred over empathy and rash judgment over reasoned response.