Trump— More Racist Than Andrew Johnson & Andrew Jackson Combined!
There’s been drumbeat in the mainstream media about African-Americans and Hispanics deserting Biden and the Democratic Party and going over to Trump, much of it based on fatally flawed polling by Siena from the NY Times. Keep in mind that majorities of Cuban and Venezuelan immigrants were conservatives and their communities have tended to support Republicans. Mexican, Salvadoran, Guatemalan and Dominican immigrants and their descendants— as well as Puerto Ricans— tend to support Democrats in large numbers. Although some Mexican-Americans in the Rio Grande Valley have gone over to the Dark Side. As for African-Americans, Republicans have rarely gotten to 10% in the last 5 decades and that should hold true for 2024.
It’s interesting that the Trump regime-in-waiting has already been plotting against the interests of people of color even as the media talks up Trump’s appeal to those voters. The newly Trumpified and weaponized RNC has ended its top program for minority group outreach, saving money to give it to Trump’s legal defense fund.
And yesterday Alex Thompson reported that the Trumpists have some pretty blatantly racist plans in mind for a second Trump term, rolling back progress for minorities in a big way. He wrote that if Señor T “returns to the White House, close allies want to dramatically change the government's interpretation of Civil Rights-era laws to focus on ‘anti-white racism’ rather than discrimination against people of color. Trump's Justice Department would push to eliminate or upend programs in government and corporate America that are designed to counter racism that has favored whites. Targets would range from decades-old policies aimed at giving minorities economic opportunities to more recent programs that began in response to the pandemic and the killing of George Floyd. Trump campaign spokesperson Steven Cheung told Axios: ‘As President Trump has said, all staff, offices, and initiatives connected to Biden's un-American policy will be immediately terminated.’ Longtime aides and allies [like neo-Nazi Stephen Miller] preparing for a potential second Trump administration have been laying legal groundwork with a flurry of lawsuits and legal complaints— some of which have been successful.”
Thompson wrote that “The Heritage Foundation's well-funded ‘Project 2025’ envisions a second Trump administration ending what it calls ‘affirmative discrimination.’ Part of the plan, written by former Trump Justice Department official Gene Hamilton, argues that ‘advancing the interests of certain segments of American society... comes at the expense of other Americans— and in nearly all cases violates longstanding federal law.’ [These racist ideas] have gained momentum with the Supreme Court's turn to the right— most notably its recent rejection of affirmative action in college admissions. The court ruled that programs designed to benefit people of color and address past injustices discriminate against white and Asian Americans. In 2021, a federal judge blocked a $4 billion program to help Black farmers. Earlier this month, another federal judge ruled that the Commerce Department's Minority Business Development Agency was discriminating against white people and that the program had to be open to everyone.”
He also reminded his readers that “Trump has portrayed himself as the victim of racism amid his legal troubles. He repeatedly has said Black women prosecutors in Georgia and New York are ‘racist.’ His political career really began in 2011 as the chief Birther-agitator, questioning Barack Obama's eligibility to be president. When Trump jumped into the presidential race in 2015, he accused Mexico of dumping criminals and rapists into the U.S.”
The second term would be the culmination of goals that began with appointing judges unsympathetic to calls for racial equality, Neil Gorsuch, Brett Kavanaugh and Amy Coney Barrett to the Supreme Court plus a startling 54 to U.S. courts of appeals and 174 to U.S. district courts. It puts a sense of urgency on the calls for progressive icon Sonia Sotomayor to retire while Biden call still appoint and the Senate would still confirm her replacement. Don’t forget what a catastrophe it was when Ruth Bader Ginsburg refused to retire, then died, only to be instantly replaced by Amy Coney Barrett. Sotomayor is only 70 but, wrote Mehdi Hasan, “The damage to our democracy from a 7-2 hard-right court would be on a whole other and existential level. Yes, 6-3 has been a disaster for our progressive priorities but there have also been a handful of key 5-4 victories in cases where Roberts plus one other conservative have come over from the dark side. None of that happens in a 7-2 court. The hard-right conservatives win not just most of the time but every single time… If insanity is doing the same thing again and again and expecting different results, then I’m sorry but a liberal supreme court justice about to enter her 70s and refusing to retire on a Democratic president and Democratic Senate’s watch is nothing short of insane.”
Trump has always been a virulent racist and the very first time he was ever in a newspaper (1973) was when he was caught discriminating against people of color attempting to rent apartments in buildings his family owned. The Nixon Justice Department opened a case against the Trump Management Corporation which the Donald was running at the time, alleging civil rights violations (racial discrimination) in buildings with subsidies intended to support low-income housing developments. Trump had violated the terms of the programs by discriminating against African-American and Puerto Rican tenants.
Trump had his agent mark the applications of African American would be renters with a ‘C’ for ‘colored’ and steering them away claiming the advertised apartments were already rented. Trump was in his late twenties at the time. The case ultimately ended in a settlement in 1975, in which Trump agreed to desegregate his rental properties and take steps to ensure compliance with fair housing laws.
Although the settlement didn’t result in any criminal charges or substantial financial penalties against Trump personally, it brought public attention, for the first time, but certainly not the last, to his business practices, ethics and ugly racism, setting a precedent for the controversy that followed him throughout his career in real estate and, more recently, alas, in politics. In 1989 he took out full-page ads in New York newspapers calling for the reinstatement of the death penalty following the arrest of five Black and Latino teenagers, known as the Central Park Five, who were wrongfully convicted of raping a jogger in Central Park. Even after the teenagers were exonerated in 2002 when the real perpetrator confessed, Trump continued to maintain their guilt and defended his position, despite evidence of their innocence.
I ran this by Florida Senate candidate Alan Grayson this morning. “Essentially,” he said, “Trump wants everyone to feel really sorry and sad for rich white men. ‘O, Nineveh! O, Tyre!’ The Trump Pity Party continues, 24/7/365. Here’s Trump’s idea of affirmative action”: