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“So why, when I mention (crime), all of a sudden I’m a racist?” asked Donald Trump on Fox News [ [link removed] ] in 2015. “I’m not racist,” Trump said [ [link removed] ]. “I don’t have a racist bone in my body.”
That’s something most people never have to say. No one is pressing Melania Trump to come out and say she has never had a racist bone in her body. Even most of Elon Musk’s DOGE bros haven’t posted anything racist on the Internet, as far as we know. And the DOGE bros who did post racist things on the Internet were just boys being boys in a very particular white-boy way. They were just locker-room-talk racists, not full-blown Nazis—not a single swastika on any of their bones.
In his book, American Crusade, Pete Hegseth wrote about Muslims as if they were a prolific invasive species and expressed concern about the number of American boys named Muhammad. He tucked his racism inside of Islamophobia. JD Vance championed the ridiculous lie about nonwhite people eating dogs and cats in Springfield, Ohio well before Donald Trump repeated the lie, but Vance made it cute by saying “Haitia” (HAY-sha) instead of “Haiti,” which was somehow less funny than Alicia Silverstone calling Haitians “Haiti-ans” in Clueless. Hegseth and Vance were just engaged in a little men’s-room-talk racism, which came in second only to Grindr messages as a mode of communication during the last Republican National Convention. The Vice President and Secretary of Defense have not felt compelled to check for racist bones.
The “all of a sudden” part of what Trump said on Fox News implied that being thought of as a racist was something new for him. An acquaintance of mine repeated a version of that claim the other day on Facebook (of course). There’s no talking him out of that belief (of course), but things that play out over decades don’t fit accepted definitions of “sudden.”
In 1973, Fred and Donald Trump were sued [ [link removed] ] by the Justice Department for racial discrimination at their real estate properties. They would not rent apartments in predominantly white buildings to Black tenants, a fact confirmed by test tenants sent into various Trump offices. Applications from Black apartment-seekers were flagged to keep them separated, a policy that workers in those offices said came from top management. In some offices a separate piece of paper with a big letter “C” for “colored” drawn on it was attached to applications—a nice throwback to the Jim Crow era. Fred and Donald Trump were old-school racists. It was kind of in their bones.
As much as Donald Trump has tried to claim otherwise, that 1973 racial discrimination lawsuit was specific to Trump properties, and the consent decree settling the suit was also specific and designed to force behavior that would have come naturally to people who were not racist. The Trumps were accused of violating the consent decree in 1978, but by then “white flight” from those parts of the city was rendering it a moot issue.
Long before Donald Trump was shouting in all caps on social media, he was shouting about the Central Park Five in all caps in full-page ads [ [link removed] ] he placed in four New York City newspapers in 1989. The Central Park Five (now the Exonerated Five) were accused of severely beating and sexually assaulting a jogger in Central Park. The headline for the ad Trump placed in New York Newsday was in all caps (of course) and underlined: “BRING BACK THE DEATH PENALTY. BRING BACK OUR POLICE!” Also in all caps, in the body of the ad: “CIVIL LIBERTIES END WHEN AN ATTACK ON OUR SAFETY BEGINS!” The guy has always been quick to discard civil liberties.
Trump baselessly accused the five Black and Hispanic teenagers (ages 14-16) of laughing at the anguish of the victim’s family and said that they did so because they knew they would be back on the streets “to rape and maim and kill once again.” Kill once again? The victim of the attack in Central Park didn’t die. She was brutally assaulted and in a coma for twelve days. She awoke with no memory of the attack.
The Central Park Five [ [link removed] ] were all convicted and served time. They were exonerated in 2002 when Matias Reyes, a convicted rapist and murderer, confessed to the crime. Reyes’s DNA matched that found on the assaulted jogger, and her hands had been bound in the same way as another of Reyes’s victims.
New York City paid the Exonerated Five a $41 Million settlement in 2014, but Donald Trump has never let it go. A confession backed by DNA and modus operandi evidence wasn’t enough for him. In Trump’s mind, five people who would have had a “C” placed on their Trump rental property applications had to be guilty of something. In 2016 [ [link removed] ], he said, “The police doing the original investigation say they were guilty. The fact that the case was settled with so much evidence against them is outrageous.” And in 2019 [ [link removed] ]: “You have people on both sides of that. They admitted their guilt. If you look at some of the prosecutors, they think that the city should never have settled that case.” And in the September 2024 [ [link removed] ] presidential debate: “They pled guilty.” (Not true.) “And I said, well, if they pled guilty, they badly hurt a person, killed a person, ultimately.” Again, the victim is still alive.
Trump famously questioned the citizenship of the first Black president for years. In 2020, he amplified a claim by future insurrectionist John Eastman that Kamala Harris wasn’t a natural-born citizen, and in January 2024, he shared a Gateway Pundit post claiming the same thing about Nikki Haley. There is a pattern here, and it is not hard to see. You can feel it in your bones.
And so, dear social-media acquaintances, forget your “all of a sudden” story. Do not try to claim it is an accident when pages on the Tuskegee Airmen or Jackie Robinson or the 442nd Infantry Regiment or Navajo Code Talkers are removed from Department of Defense websites. Don’t expect others to believe that removing links to webpages about Black, Hispanic, and female veterans buried at Arlington National Cemetery is a way of restoring a “warrior ethos.”
Each of those removals reflected careless and callous leadership at the top. The Trump administration can claim all they want that they are fixing problems brought on by this or that horrible acronym, but those claims will always be nothing but an excuse for bald racism. There’s no reason to tiptoe around it. Americans can feel it in their bones.
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