https://www.washingtonpost.com/nati...2b0b68-f10f-11ea-b796-2dd09962649c_story.html
Allegations of racism have marked Trump’s presidency and become key i…
Marine One, carrying President Trump, departs the White House in July. (Jabin Botsford/The Washington Post)
In unguarded moments with senior aides, President Trump has maintained that Black Americans have mainly themselves to blame in their struggle for equality, hindered more by lack of initiative than societal impediments, according to current and former U.S. officials.
After phone calls with Jewish lawmakers, Trump has muttered that Jews “are only in it for themselves” and “stick together” in an ethnic allegiance that exceeds other loyalties, officials said.
Trump’s private musings about Hispanics match the vitriol he has displayed in public, and his antipathy to Africa is so ingrained that when first lady Melania Trump planned a 2018 trip to that continent he railed that he “could never understand why she would want to go there.”
When challenged on these views by subordinates, Trump has invariably responded with indignation. “He would say, ‘No one loves Black people more than me,’ ” a former senior White House official said. The protests rang hollow because if the president were truly guided by such sentiments he “wouldn’t need to say it,” the official said. “You let your actions speak.”
In Trump’s case, there is now a substantial record of his actions as president that have compounded the perceptions of racism created by his words.
Over 3½ years in office, he has presided over a sweeping U.S. government retreat from the front lines of civil rights, endangering decades of progress against voter suppression, housing discrimination and police misconduct.
His immigration policies hark back to quota systems of the 1920s that were influenced by the junk science of eugenics, and have involved enforcement practices — including the separation of small children from their families — that seemed designed to maximize trauma on Hispanic migrants.
With the election looming, the signaling behind even second-tier policy initiatives has been unambiguous.
After rolling back regulations designed to encourage affordable housing for minorities, Trump declared himself the champion of the “Suburban Lifestyle Dream.” He ordered aides to revamp racial sensitivity training at federal agenciesso that it no longer refers to “White privilege.” In a speech at the National Archives on Thursday, Trump vowed to overhaul what children are taught in the nation’s schools — something only states have the power to do — while falsely claiming that students are being “fed lies about America being a wicked nation plagued by racism.”
The America envisioned by these policies and pronouncements is one dedicated to preserving a racial hierarchy that can be seen in Trump’s own Cabinet and White House, both overwhelmingly white and among the least diverse in recent U.S. history.
Scholars describe Trump’s record on race in historically harsh terms. Carol Anderson, a professor of African American Studies at Emory University, compared Trump to Andrew Johnson, who succeeded Abraham Lincoln as president and helped Southern Whites reestablish much of the racial hegemony they had seemingly lost in the Civil War.
“Johnson made it clear that he was really the president of a few people, not the American people,” Anderson said. “And Trump has done the same.”
A second White House official who worked closely with Trump quibbled with the comparison, but only because later Oval Office occupants also had intolerant views.
“Woodrow Wilson was outwardly a white supremacist,” the former official said. “I don’t think Trump is as bad as Wilson. But he might be.”
White House officials vigorously dispute such characterizations.
“Donald Trump’s record as a private citizen and as president has been one of fighting for inclusion and advocating for the equal treatment of all,” said Sarah Matthews, a White House spokeswoman. “Anyone who suggests otherwise is only seeking to sow division.”
No senior U.S. official interviewed could recall Trump uttering a racial or ethnic slur while in office. Nor did any consider him an adherent of white supremacy or white nationalism, extreme ideologies that generally sanction violence to protect White interests or establish a racially pure ethno-state.
White House officials also pointed to achievements that have benefited minorities, including job growth and prison-sentence reform.
But even those points fade under scrutiny. Black unemployment has surged disproportionately during the coronavirus pandemic, and officials said Trump regretted reducing prison sentences when it didn’t produce a spike in Black voter support.
And there are indications that even Trump’s allies are worried about his record on race. The Republican Party devoted much of its convention in August to persuading voters that Trump is not a racist, with far more Black speakers at the four-day event than have held top White House positions over the past four years.
This story is based on interviews with more than two dozen current and former officials, including some who have had daily interactions with the president, as well as experts on race and members of white supremacist groups. Many spoke on the condition of anonymity, citing a desire to provide candid accounts of events and conversations they witnessed without fear of retribution.
Coded racial terms
President Trump listens during an expanded bilateral meeting with Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi in the Cabinet Room of the White House in June 2017. (Jabin Botsford/The Washington Post)
Most attributed Trump’s views on race and conduct to a combination of the prevailing attitudes of his privileged upbringing in the 1950s in what was then a predominantly White borough of New York, as well as a cynical awareness that coded racial terms and gestures can animate substantial portions of his political base.
The perspectives of those closest to the president are shaped by their own biases and self-interests. They have reason to resist the idea that they served a racist president. And they are, with few exceptions, themselves White males.
Others have offered less charitable assessments.
Omarosa Manigault Newman, one of the few Black women to have worked at the White House, said in her 2018 memoir that she was enlisted by White House aides to track down a rumored recording from “The Apprentice” — the reality show on which she was a contestant — in which Trump allegedly used the n-word. A former official said that others involved in the effort included Trump adviser Hope Hicks and former White House spokeswoman Sarah Sanders.
The tape, if it exists, was never recovered. But Manigault Newman, who was forced out after clashing with other White House staff, portrayed the effort to secure the tape as evidence that aides saw Trump capable of such conduct. In the book, she described Trump as “a racist, misogynist and bigot.”
Mary L. Trump, the president’s niece, has said that casual racism was prevalent in the Trump family. In interviews to promote her recently published book, she has said that she witnessed her uncle using both anti-Semitic slurs as well as the n-word, though she offered few details and no evidence.
Michael Cohen, the president’s former lawyer, has made similar allegations and calls Trump “a racist, a predator, a con man” in a newly published book. Cohen accuses Trump of routinely disparaging people of color, including former president Barack Obama. “Tell me one country run by a Black person that isn’t a s---hole,” Trump said, according to Cohen.
These authors did not provide direct evidence of Trump’s racist outbursts, but the animus they describe aligns with the prejudice Trump so frequently displays in public.
In recent months, Trump has condemned Black Lives Matter as a “symbol of hate” while defending armed White militants who entered the Michigan Capitol, right-wing activists who waved weapons from pickup trucks in Portland and a White teen who shot and killed two protesters in Wisconsin.
Trump has vowed to safeguard the legacies of Confederate generals while skipping the funeral of the late congressman John Lewis (D-Ga.), a civil rights icon, and retweeted — then deleted — video of a supporter shouting “White power” while questioning the electoral eligibility of Sen. Kamala D. Harris (D-Calif.), the nation’s first Black and Asian American candidate for vice president from a major party. In so doing, Trump reanimated a version of the false “birther” claim he had used to suggest that Obama may not have been born in the United States.
These add to an already voluminous record of incendiary statements, including his tweet that minority congresswomen should “go back” to their “crime infested” countries despite being U.S.-born or U.S. citizens, and his claim that there were “very fine people on both sides” after torch-carrying white nationalists staged a violent protest in Charlottesville.
In a measure of Trump’s standing with such organizations, the st0rmfr0nt website — the oldest and largest neo-Nazi platform on the Internet — recently issued a call to its followers to mobilize.
“If Trump doesn’t win this election, the police will be abolished and Blacks will come to your house and kill you and your family,” the site warned. “This isn’t about politics anymore, it is about basic survival.”
As the election approaches, Trump has also employed apocalyptic language. He recently claimed that if Democratic nominee Joe Biden is elected, police departments will be dismantled, the American way of life will be “abolished” and “no one will be SAFE.”
Given the country’s anguished history, it is hard to isolate Trump’s impact on the racial climate in the United States. But his first term has coincided with the most intense period of racial upheaval in a generation. And the country is now in the final stretch of a presidential campaign that is more explicitly focused on race — including whether the sitting president is a racist — than any election in modern American history.
Biden has seized on the issue from the outset. In a video declaring his candidacy, he used images from the clashes in Charlottesville, and said he felt compelled to run because of Trump’s response. He has called Trump the nation’s first racist president and pledged to use his presidency to heal divisions that are a legacy of the country’s “original sin” of slavery.
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