Trump has history of taking advantage of racial tensions
For the fourth season of The Apprentice, Donald Trump searched for a gimmick to bolster ratings. His idea was simple if explosive — pit an all-white team against an all-black team.
“Do you like it?” he asked, previewing the concept on Howard Stern’s radio show in April 2005. “Yes,” Stern said. “Do you like it?” Trump asked Robin Quivers, the African American co-host.
“Well,” she said, “I think you’re going to have a riot.”
That gave Trump no pause. “It would be the highest-rated show on television,” he exulted.
Long before he ignited a firestorm by telling four Democratic congresswomen of color to “go back” to their home countries, even though three were born in the United States and all are citizens, Trump sought to pit Americans against one another along racial lines.
Over decades in business, entertainment and now politics, Trump has approached America’s racial, ethnic and religious divisions opportunistically, not as the nation’s wounds to be healed but as openings to achieve his goals without regard for adverse consequences.
He was accused by government investigators in the 1970s of refusing to rent apartments to black tenants (he denied it but settled the case) and made a name for himself in the 1980s championing the death penalty for five black and Hispanic rape suspects who were later exonerated. He threatened to sell his Mar-a-Lago estate to the Unification Church in 1991 and unleash “thousands of Moonies” if city officials in Palm Beach, Fla., did not allow him to carve up his property.
Taking on competitors of his Atlantic City casinos, he questioned whether rival owners were really Native Americans entitled to federal recognition — then later teamed up with another tribe when there was money to be made. With his eye on the White House, he opened a yearslong drive to convince Americans that President Barack Obama was really born in Africa.
His own campaign in 2016 was marked by slurs against Mexicans, a proposed Muslim ban and other furors. To deflect criticism, two campaign officials said they regularly positioned a supporter nicknamed “Michael the Black Man” so cameras would show him behind Trump at his rallies.
In the White House, Trump equated “both sides” of a white supremacist rally in Charlottesville, Va., referred to African nations as “shithole countries” and said Nigerian visitors to the United States would never “go back to their huts.”
White House officials argue that actions speak louder than words. Unemployment among Hispanics and African Americans has fallen to record lows on Trump’s watch, they say, and the president signed legislation overhauling a criminal justice system tilted against people of color.
‘The city was a cauldron’
As Trump sought to make his mark in Manhattan real estate in the 1980s and 1990s, New York was struggling with a string of racial episodes, including the Bernhard Goetz subway shooting, the Howard Beach racial killing, the Tawana Brawley rape hoax and the Crown Heights riots.
In a city rived by tribal politics, elections were about assembling coalitions — ethnic groups in Queens and Brooklyn, Hispanics in the Bronx, African Americans in Harlem and, later, central Brooklyn. Race was a part of every citywide campaign every four years. That shaped the outlook of many rising stars of the moment.
“It was a period of enormous tension and the city was a cauldron for those kind of emotions and very strong passions and feelings, and they spilled over,” said Robert Abrams, the special prosecutor in the Brawley case. “And unfortunately, I think Donald Trump was helping to fan some of those flames.”
The Justice Department housing discrimination lawsuit against him and his father and the case of the Central Park Five accused of rape were early mile markers on Trump’s path. But he was a Democrat then operating in a diverse city, and he showed a different side to many he met.
Charles Rangel, then a powerful African American Democratic congressman from New York, saw Trump regularly when the developer would drop off checks for the party. What defined him was his “giant ego,” Rangel said the other day, but he never heard him make a racial remark.
“I don’t remember any remarks he ever made that was not sharing with me how much he thought about himself,” he said. “It was always the same story.”
‘Laziness is a trait in blacks’
Some who worked for Trump said he showed his true colors after growing comfortable with people. Jack O’Donnell, who was president of the Trump Plaza Hotel and Casino and later wrote a scathing book about Trump, said the mogul would come into the casino and notice many African Americans. “It’s a little dark tonight,” he would say.
According to O’Donnell, Trump said “laziness is a trait in blacks” and complained about an African American accountant: “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.”
In an interview, O’Donnell said Trump trafficked in stereotypes. “He genuinely believes things like white people are smarter. And black people don’t want to live next to white, and white people don’t want to live next to black people,” O’Donnell said. “And he rationalizes that as, everybody thinks that, so it’s not racist.”