Trump, America’s Racist in Chief

It’s hard to believe that very many Americans would even consider electing a card-carrying member of the Ku Klux Klan to be our president. So why did we elect Donald Trump? And why do we keep him?

Trump was never a member of the Klan, at least not that we know of, but if he had been he would have deserved an honored place in the KKK Hall of Fame.

Trump denies being a racist, of course, but he has a history of making speeches and taking actions that journalists, his former employees, even his friends and family members have agreed were racist.

In 2018, The New York Times even undertook a study of racial comments he’s made in public. The Times concluded: “Here’s the truth: Donald Trump is a racist. He talks about and treats people differently based on their race. He has done so for years, and he is still doing so.”

The Times attempted to compile a definitive list of his racist comments, at least the publicly known ones. Here’s a condensed version of some of the items on that list:

In the 1970s his real-estate company tried to avoid renting apartments to Black people while offering white prospects special privileges.

He said of a Black accountant at one of his hotels, “I think that the guy is lazy. And it’s probably not his fault, because laziness is a trait in Blacks.”

In 2015 Trump called for “a total and complete shutdown of Muslims entering the United States.” His plan would have even denied readmission to Muslim-American citizens who were outside of the country at the time.

He said a federal judge hearing a case about Trump University was biased because of the judge’s Mexican heritage.

In June 2017 he said 15,000 recent immigrants from Haiti “all have AIDS” and that 40,000 Nigerians, once seeing the United States, would never “go back to their huts” in Africa.

At the White House earlier this month, Trump called for less immigration from Haiti and Africa and more from Norway (although there is none from Norway).

During a White House meeting in 2018, he referred to some undocumented immigrants as “animals” who would “pour into and infest our country.”

And that’s just a partial list.

And that was seven years ago. It has continued, and it continues.

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Just last month, President Trump deliberately spit in Black people’s faces when he ignored Juneteenth, a federal holiday celebrated every June 19 to commemorate the end of slavery in the United States. Trump didn’t even mention it. His snub should gall every one of us, but especially Black people. It was despicable.

Another recent example of his racism: After suspending the program for admitting refugees into the United States, Trump made an exception for one group: white South Africans, because, as he wrote on Truth Social, the South African government is “taking the land of white Farmers, and then killing them and their families.” He even accused the government of “committing genocide.” It was all lies, of course, and easily proven so. But nevertheless Afrikaners are here while refugees from Afghanistan (even including those who helped us in the war there), Congo, Haiti, Iran, Libia, Somalia, Sudan, among others, are totally banned.

Still another example: Jim Wallis, the theologian, writer, teacher and political activist, writing in his “God’s Politics” newsletter, quoted “Border Czar” Tom Homan as saying that questioning, detaining and arresting undocumented immigrants can be based on “the location, their occupation, their physical appearance” to create a “reasonable suspicion.” Homan later tried to walk that back, but U.S. Rep. Matthew Frost (D-Fla.) showed how spot-on accurate his words were. Frost visited Trump’s newest detention center for immigrants, the so-called “Alligator Alcatraz” in Florida’s python-infested Everglades, and he later said the only detainees he saw there were Latino and Haitian men. He did not see one European who had overstayed his visa.

It gets worse. The Washington Post reports that acting ICE Director Todd Lyons instructed his officers to hold all immigrants in their custody “for the duration of their removal proceedings.” That could take months, even years, which means that the detainees will have no right to request a bond hearing for release from ICE custody.
The order also applies to long-time, law-abiding residents who ICE agents are picking up everywhere.

Trump says they are focusing on violent criminals, and that only “the worst of the worst” are being exposed, but that’s just another lie in Trump’s never-ending spewing of lies. He’s arresting as many brown-skinned laborers, landscapers and service people as he can.

And if there is any doubt that he intends to deport as many Brown people as he can, consider this: Trump’s “big beautiful bill” that just passed Congress includes $145 billion for ICE, which makes ICE the fourth-largest military in the world, behind only the United States, China and Russia. That should horrify every one of us.

Jim Wallis put it this way: “The purpose of Trump’s mass deportation policies are to instill cruelty and fear and thereby pressure whole families, whose many members are frequently mixed with documented, undocumented, and birthright citizen status. The ultimate goal is to erase more Brown and Black people from America.”

It seems to me that Trump’s blatant racism would be enough to turn most Americans against him, but apparently it isn’t. Even when you add in the millions of his supporters he deserted after they elected him – farmers, small business owners, veterans, Medicaid recipients, SNAP recipients, people who live in rural areas, even the Proud Boys and other supernationalists – he still has a rock-solid base of sycophants who will not go away. A raft of new polls last week puts his job approval rate at an anemic 41-48 percent and shrinking, but that’s still a lot of people who support him.

And that’s what amazes me. It seems impossible that in the land of the free and the home of the brave any nonbillionaire American would support such a heartless racist and misogynist – not to mention a traitor to Democracy, a would-be dictator, a person who denies millions of people their lives just because they’re not American, is willing to take food away from American children and deny health care to millions so he can give the savings to billionaires, and, and, and!

The only apparent answers that I can see are that 1) they get all their news from Fox News, just as Trump does and therefore they are just as ignorant as he is; 2) they don’t pay attention to current events at all and so they are even more ignorant; 3) they really want to destroy our democracy and let this madman become our dictator; or 4) they are just as racist and misogynistic as he is, and they want his brand of bigotries to be part of our government. .

We’ve got to get that person out of the White House. He’s got to be impeached now, not wait until the 2026 midterms. He is destroying America, but if just a handful of MAGAs in Congress will change their minds, it can be done. And it appears that the upcoming midterm elections just might be scaring enough of them to make it happen.

It’s up to us, We the People, to make it happen. As we all know now, we cannot depend on the Congress, the Supreme Court or the legacy press to make it happen, so we’re all that’s left.

And we can make it happen if we keep the faith and do not give up. It’s all hands on deck time now as never before, so I repeat: You’re either part of the solution or part of the problem.

We can win. We must win. We will win if we stay together and do not quit.

Onward and Upward!

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