President Donald Trump has called out upcoming Democratic rival Joe Biden for his remarks about the Black community. He also attempted to seize the opportunity and tout his own record on race relations, though there’s plenty of evidence to the contrary.
“Joe Biden this morning totally disparaged and insulted the Black community,” Trump told reporters, via Yahoo!. “What he said is incredible, and I don’t know what’s going on with him, but it was a very insulting statement he made.” Trump was reacting to Biden’s recent remarks where he claimed the Latino community was more diverse than the Black community. “You go to Florida, and you find a very different attitude about immigration in certain places than you do when you’re in Arizona,” Biden told NPR.
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Trump’s Senior Campaign Advisor Katrina Pierson also condemned Biden’s remarks. “President Trump has a true record of helping Black Americans, with unprecedented economic opportunity, record funding for HBCUs, criminal justice reform, and support for school choice. Joe Biden would rather we all just shut up, get in line, and know our place.”
Despite Pierson’s claims, Trump himself has his own history of racist actions against the Black community, some dating back decades, as Vox noted back in 2016. Here’s a look at just a few.
Department of Justice Lawsuit
Back in 1973, then-President Richard Nixon’s Department of Justice sued the Trump Management Corporation for its violation of the Fair Housing Act. There was ample evidence that Trump and his late father, Fred Trump, refused to rent to Black tenants. In 1975, he signed an agreement to not discriminate against non-white renters, though he never admitted to engaging such acts.
Trump’s Casinos
In the 1980s, when Trump had rebranded himself as a casino magnate, he had allegedly practiced discrimination there as well. Former Trump’s Castle employee Kip Brown made some shocking revelations to The New Yorker back in 2015. “When Donald and Ivana came to the casino, the bosses would order all the black people off the floor,” he explained. “It was the eighties, I was a teenager, but I remember it: They put us all in the back.”
The Central Park Five
Back in 1989, a jogger was raped in New York City, with four Black and one Latino teenagers stood accused of the crime, despite a lack of evidence. Regardless, Trump took out full-page ads in numerous newspapers, including the New York Times, calling for their execution. “BRING BACK THE DEATH PENALTY. BRING BACK OUR POLICE!,” the ads read, foreshadowing Trump’s preferred all-caps method of tweeting. After spending several years in prison, their convictions were vacated and they were awarded a $41 million sentiment. That wasn’t enough to convince Trump, who in October of 2016 said he thinks they’re guilty of the crime.
‘Trumped!’
John R. O’Donnell, the former president of Trump Plaza Hotel and Casino in Atlantic City, quoted the president in his 1991 book Trumped! “Black guys counting my money! I hate it. The only kind of people I want counting my money are short guys that wear yarmulkes every day,” Trump allegedly said at the time. “I think that the guy is lazy. And it’s probably not his fault, because laziness is a trait in blacks. It really is, I believe that. It’s not anything they can control.” Speaking to Playboy six years later, Trump conceded that “the stuff O’Donnell wrote about me is probably true.”
(More) Workplace Discrimination
Just one year after the release of Trumped!, UPI noted that the Trump Plaza Hotel and Casino was required to pay a $200,000 fine after it transferred Black and female dealers off tables to placate the racist requests of high-stakes gamblers.
‘The Apprentice’
During Season 2 of The Apprentice in 2004, Trump fired Black contestant Kevin Allen for being over-educated. “You’re an unbelievably talented guy in terms of education, and you haven’t done anything,” Trump told Allen on-camera. “At some point you have to say, ‘That’s enough.”
The following year, he pitched a version of the reality show that would pit Black and white people against one another. At the time, he boasted “an idea that is fairly controversial — creating a team of successful African Americans versus a team of successful whites.” He justified it as being “somewhat reflective of our very vicious world.”
Birtherism
Three years after the election of President Barack Obama in 2008, Trump began floating the idea that he wasn’t born in the U.S., despite any evidence supporting this claim. He went so far as to send investigators to Hawaii, though Obama later released his long-form birth certificate. Trump reportedly remained unconvinced, unwilling to accept that a Black man was born in the U.S. and later elected president.
