Make Trump last racist president
He hates what makes America great
It was amusing at the start of the great racist tweet controversy to hear the media asking, “Is President Donald Trump a racist?” We are well beyond that question.
“I am the least racist person you have ever met,” he has said numerous times. If you were living solo on a deserted island and he showed up, that might be true, but for everyone else, it’s just another delusional claim. I have met the president myself, and he’s off by one word. He is not the least racist person I’ve ever met — he is the most.
Trump supporters reading this will probably get upset and melt like snowflakes. Yet since October 1973, when Richard Nixon’s Justice Department sued Trump and his father Fred for barring blacks from their apartment buildings, the president has been a known racist — and a congenital one at that.
The least racist person you have ever met? You don’t know the history of the Central Park Five (Trump called for the death penalty for the accused teens), or the history of blacks who worked at his casinos (fine paid for discrimination, and much more) in Atlantic City.
The least racist person you have ever met? “Laziness is a trait in blacks. It really is, I believe that. It’s not anything they can control,” he told Playboy in 1997. Mexicans? “They’re rapists.” White supremacists waving swastikas in Charlottesville? “Very fine people on both sides.” On and on and on.
Remember when Trump (you know, the least racist person you’ve ever met) said Haitian immigrants “all have AIDS” and many African nations are “s---hole countries?” He said once Nigerians have seen the United States, they would never “go back to their huts.” The joke’s on him and his base. According to Trump’s own Census Bureau, Nigerian immigrants are far better educated than white Americans.
Not the first White House racist
Americans have survived racist presidents before. Woodrow Wilson opposed postwar Reconstruction because “the dominance of an ignorant and inferior race was justly dreaded.” Allowing blacks to vote, he said, would be “a menace to society.” And as president, a century ago, he oversaw the resegregation of the federal government.
Calvin Coolidge signed an immigration bill aimed at keeping out “the yellow peril” — i.e., Asians, along with Africans and Arabs. “America must be kept American,” he said in 1923.
And most people know that after the Japanese bombed Pearl Harbor, Franklin D. Roosevelt issued an executive order leading to the forced relocation of 117,000 Japanese Americans to internment camps. But few know that in 1925, Roosevelt wrote that “Japanese immigrants are not capable of assimilation into the American population ... Anyone who has traveled in the Far East knows that the mingling of Asiatic blood with European and American blood produces, in nine cases out of ten, the most unfortunate results.”
FDR led us through the Great Depression and World War II. He was one of our greatest presidents. Yet those words cannot be ignored.
Visions of racial superiority
There are other examples — Andrew Johnson, who succeeded Lincoln, was probably the worst of all — but you get the idea. American history is dotted with presidents who harbored visions of racial superiority.
But not in the modern era, at least not to the degree we have seen with Trump. He went from bad to worse with his attacks on “The Squad” — Reps. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, D-N.Y., Ilhan Omar, D-Minn., Ayanna Pressley DMass., and Rashida Tlaib, D-Mich., all young freshman congresswomen of color. And saying they hate America?
Actually, Trump seems to hate America. He has complained about several amendments to our Constitution, our checks and balances, our judicial system, our free press, people who are different than him. Why does he hate the things that make our country great? And how do the rest of us get beyond this hatred and ignorance?
Donald Trump is not our first racist president. Let us hope, however, that he will be our last.
Paul Brandus, founder and White House bureau chief of West Wing Reports, is the author of “Under This Roof: The White House and the Presidency” and a member of USA TODAY’s Board of Contributors.