Andrew Malekoff
Isn’t it ironic that among the leading government officials serving criminal indictments to Donald Trump, given his well-documented history of racism and misogyny, are several highly accomplished Black American women who have risen in stature in the U.S. judicial system?
For example, there are District Attorney Fani Willis in Georgia, Attorney General Letitia James in New York, and Judge Tonya S. Chutkan in the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia.
This is a case of poetic justice despite Trump’s claim to be the “least racist person in the world.” Let’s examine the record.
A young black employee who worked at Trump’s Castle in Atlantic City in the 1980s recalled, “When Donald and Ivana came to the casino, the bosses would order all the Black people off the floor. I was a teenager, but I remember it: They put us all in the back.”
In 1989 Trump took out a full-page notice in the New York Times with the headline: “BRING BACK THE DEATH PENALTY. BRING BACK OUR POLICE!”
The ad called for New York State to adopt the death penalty after “The Central Park Five,” a group of black and Latino teenagers were accused and convicted of brutally assaulting and raping a white woman jogging in New York City’s Central Park (there was a sixth accused, who pleaded out to another crime). “They should be forced to suffer and, when they kill, they should be executed for their crimes.”
They were later exonerated, after having been incarcerated for 7 to 13 years, when the real assailant later stepped forward and confessed.
In 1993, during Congressional testimony, Trump said that some Native American reservations operating casinos shouldn’t be allowed because “they don’t look like Indians to me.”
Beginning in 2011, Trump was a key antagonist in the Obama birther conspiracy theory. He had no evidence whatsoever that Obama was not a naturally born American citizen, but he pushed ahead, spreading the lie. In September 2016 Trump finally acknowledged that Obama was born in Hawaii in 1961.
In 2016, Trump said U.S. District Judge Gonzalo Curiel, who was involved in lawsuits regarding Trump University, should recuse himself because of his Mexican ethnicity. Trump’s rationale was that since he pledged to build a wall on the southern border with Mexico that Judge Curiel had to be biased against him.
In 2016 Trump referred to Mexican immigrants as criminals and rapists. One year later he enacted a “travel ban” on all Muslims entering the U.S. that lasted a little more than one month due to widespread opposition.
Once coronavirus gripped the nation in 2020 and people were dying in the tens of thousands, with refrigerated morgues lining the exteriors of hospitals, Trump referred publicly to coronavirus in racist terms like “Chinese virus” and “Kung flu.”
This contributed to growing antagonism, threats, and physical assaults against Asian-Americans, including children and the elderly, which continues to this day.
In 2021 Trump, following the false voter fraud lead of his then-attorney and advisor Rudoph Giuliani, slandered two black election workers Ruby Freeman and her daughter Shaye Moss.
He publicly accused them of ballot stuffing that never occurred. This led them to go into hiding in the face of persistent intimidation and unrelenting threats to their lives.
In 2022, Trump hosted white supremacist Nick Fuentes and antisemitic rapper Ye (Kanye West), at his Mar-a-Lago resort. Fuentes, who attended the 2017 “Unite the Right” rally in Charlottesville, Va. (Trump’s “very fine people on both sides” moment) has repeatedly spread racist and antisemitic conspiracy theories, according to the Anti-Defamation League (ADL).
“Andrew Anglin, the neo-Nazi founder of the Daily Stormer website, applauded Fuentes and Ye for their efforts to bring white supremacist and antisemitic beliefs into mainstream U.S. politics,” reported the ADL.
What is the Daily Stormer? An American far-right, neo-Nazi, white-supremacist website and commentary board that promotes the idea of a second genocide of Jews.
Just this month, after being indicted in Fulton County, Ga., for felony racketeering and numerous conspiracy charges, Trump falsely accused DA Fani Willis of having an “affair” with a “gang member” she was prosecuting. “They say there’s a young woman — a young racist in Atlanta — they say she was after a certain gang and she ended up having an affair with the head of the gang or a gang member.
And this is a person who wants to indict me wants to indict me for a perfect phone call,” Trump told supporters.
None of this is out of character for Trump, “in fact, the very first time Trump appeared in the pages of the New York Times, back in the 1970s, was when the U.S. Department of Justice sued him for racial discrimination” at Trump housing developments in New York, reported German Lopez in an Aug. 13, 2020, Vox Newsletter (note: some excerpts in this column are from German’s reporting).
Is Trump the “least racist person in the world?”
Hardly. His vast history of racist language and conduct speaks for itself. It is more than racial insensitivity and more purposeful than haphazard.
The racially and ethnically bigoted things he says and does contribute to a permission structure for white supremacists and nationalists to come out of hiding and jump on the Trump white-collar criminal organization bandwagon, all in the service of deconstructing democracy.
In due time quite a few black judicial officials, women, and men will assume leadership roles in their courtrooms, as Mr. Trump faces unknown accountability for perhaps the first time in his life. At that time, he will be left to sit and squirm quietly at the defendant’s table as justice and destiny, and no-nonsense jurists like Tonya S. Chutkan await him.
