FAIR
Donald Trump’s efforts to delegitimize Barack Obama by suggesting he’s not a native-born citizen, and questioning his qualifications for admissions to Columbia University and Harvard Law School, have drawn fire from prominent media figures like MSNBC host Lawrence O’Donnell (FAIR Blog, 4/29/11), CBS News anchor Bob Schieffer (CBS Evening News, 4/27/11) and even David Letterman (Late Show, 4/28/11), who have pointed out the racism implicit in Trump’s smears.
But few corporate journalists have so far put Trump’s anti-Obama efforts in the context of earlier racist episodes in the real estate developer’s career–a history that sheds light on the potential presidential candidate’s recent hamfisted claim: “I have a great relationship with the blacks. I’ve always had a great relationship with the blacks.” (As Washington Post columnist Eugene Robinson–4/19/11–observed regarding Trump’s awkward boast: “Yes, he said ‘the blacks.’ Twice.”)
Salon‘s Justin Elliot (4/28/11) traced Trump’s racism back to the 1970s, when the Justice Department repeatedly alleged racial discrimination by Trump Management Company, where Trump served as president. According to a New York Times report (10/16/73) about the federal case:
After Trump agreed in a 1975 deal to integrate Trump properties, in 1978 the Justice Department charged Trump Management with failing to live up to the agreement. As Elliott reports, “in 1983, a fair-housing activist cited statistics that two Trump Village developments had white majorities of at least 95 percent.” (See New York Times, 10/16/83.)
In his 1991 book Trumped!, the former president of Trump Plaza Hotel & Casino, John R. O’Donnell, recalled Trump declaring that “laziness is a trait in blacks,” and exclaiming: “Black guys counting my money! I hate it. The only kind of people I want counting my money are little short guys that wear yarmulkes every day.” Trump acknowledged in a Playboy interview (5/97; cited Huffington Post, 4/29/11), “The stuff O’Donnell wrote about me is probably true.”
Trump injected himself into a racial controversy in 1989 when, after a white female jogger was raped in Central Park, he took out full-page newspaper ads calling for the executions of the five people arrested–all minors aged 14 to 16 years old, four of them African-American and one Latino. All five were later exonerated after being convicted on the basis of what turned out to be false confessions, the crime actually having been committed by a lone serial rapist (New York Times, 12/8/02, 12/9/03).
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