Just Say It: Trump Is a Racist
Trump fits that definition many times over:
• Trump’s real-estate company was sued twice by the federal government in the 1970s for discouraging the renting of apartments to African-Americans
and preferring white tenants, such as “Jews and executives.”
• In 1989, Trump took out ads in New York newspapers urging the death penalty for five black and Latino teenagers accused of raping a white woman in Central Park; he continued to argue
that they were guilty as late as October 2016, more than 10 years after DNA evidence had exonerated them.
• He called some of those who marched alongside white supremacists in Charlottesville last August “very fine people.”
• He is quick to highlight crimes committed by dark-skinned people, sometimes exaggerating or lying
about it (such as a claim about growing crime from “radical Islamic terror” in Britain).
But the definition of a racist — the textbook definition, as Paul Ryan might say
— is someone who treats some people better than others because of their race.
• He spent years claiming that the nation’s first black president was born not in the United States
but in Africa, an outright lie that Trump still has not acknowledged as such.
Donald Trump treats black people and Latinos differently than he treats white people.
