A friend posted this on Facebook years ago and I kept it in my notepad:
“ Whenever a Trump supporter asks you to "name one time Trump was racist," feel free to link to this....
1973: The Nixon administration sued Trump for refusing to rent to black people.
1980s: Trump's casinos were accused of hiding the black staff when Trump visited.
1989: Trump took out a full-page ad, arguing for the death penalty for a group of black men (The 'Central Park Five'), effectively putting a bounty on their heads, and plaguing them with a lifetime of death threats. He was sued by the Justice Department for discrimination.
1991: “Black guys counting my money! I hate it. The only kinds of people I want counting my money are short guys that wear yarmulkes every day… I think that the [black] guy is lazy. And it’s probably not his fault, because laziness is a trait in blacks. It really is.”
1992: Trump's casino was fined $200,000 for transferring black dealers off certain tables to appease racist patrons.
1993: Trump said Native American casinos shouldn’t be allowed because “they don’t look like Indians to me.”
2000: Trump ran a series of attack ads against Native American casinos alleging (with no proof) that they were guilty of crimes.
2004: Trump fired a black contestant from 'The Apprentice' for being over-educated.
2010: Trump argued in favor of segregating Muslims in Lower Manhattan.
2011: Birtherism. Trump alleged that Obama was Kenyan based on nothing but skin color. He never apologized nor renounced that claim.
2015 (1): Trump called Mexican immigrants "rapists" who are "bringing crime and drugs" to the U.S.
2015 (2): Trump called for "a ban on all Muslims entering the U.S."
2016 (1): Trump called for a Mexican judge to recuse himself based on nothing other than his race. Paul Ryan said this was “the textbook definition of a racist comment.”
2016 (2): Trump regularly retweeted material from white supremacists and neo-Nazis during his campaign.
2016 (3): Trump tweeted a picture alleging that Hillary was Jewish, or controlled by Jewish people.
2016 (4): The Trump campaign adopted Nixon's "Law and Order" rhetoric which was based in racial fearmongering.
2016 (5): Trump told black voters "What do you have to lose?"
2017 (1): Trump asked a reporter to set up a meeting with the black caucus simply because she was black.
2017 (2): "...some very fine people on both sides" said Trump of a violent Nazi rally.
2017 (3): Trump said people from Haiti "all have AIDS" and people from Nigeria would never “go back to their huts” after seeing America.
2018 (1): Trump called Haiti and African countries shitholes.
2018 (2): Trump referenced the trail of tears to mock Elizabeth Warren.
2019: Trump tweeted that four black and brown congresswomen should go back where they came from. Then attacked Elijah Cummings. Then Baltimore. Then Al Sharpton.
2020: Trump called black protesters "THUGS" just days after calling white protesters "very good people." Then he threatened to direct the military to shoot the black protestors in the street.”
Todd...what a thing to have kept in your back pocket all these years!
Thank you for posting it.
Reading it straight through does something NO single example ever can: it turns "isolated incident"...into an unmistakable PATTERN...which is exactly the point I was driving at today.
So many of these line up with what I documented this morning...and seeing them shoulder to shoulder...across five decades is its OWN kind of argument.
Grateful you're here, Todd...and grateful you're the kind of reader who keeps the receipts!
I was thinking that a great project would be to update and enhance this list. We can make a comprehensive and living list of Trump’s bigotry and hatred.
I picked up a local newspaper in the airport in Johannesburg around the time of the South African Prime Minister's visit to Washington. Trump was spewing his nonsense about the White South African refugees. A group was in the process of emigrating to the US. Among them, a spouse rejoining another spouse already living in the US. A farmer complaining that the South African government was after his farm. Turns out the government still trying to ameliorate the devastating aftermath of apartheid wanted to buy the land and had made him, according to the paper, a very fair offer which was rejected.
In the article, the reporters had interviewed a number of South Africans. They and my tour guides regarded the whole White African refugee matter with derision.
Trump's actions speak volumes about his racism. In the words of Ruth Ben-Ghiat, an objective of Trump and his backers is to create a White ethno-state.
Ellen..this is the kind of firsthand detail...that's worth more than a DOZEN press releases.
Thank you for carrying it back from Johannesburg!
What you picked up in that paper cuts right to the heart of it: a farmer who turned down a fair offer for his land...then recast an ocean away...as a persecuted refugee.
That's the WHOLE sleight of hand in a SINGLE anecdote.
And...the fact that South Africans themselves...your guides included...met the "refugee" story with open DERISION... tells you how threadbare it is...once you're standing on the actual ground.
The persecution narrative ONLY survives at a distance...where no one can check it against the people living it.
YOU were there to check it. Grateful you brought it here, Ellen!
During that same period of time, I was having problems with DISH tv. I called and of course customer service is not in the US. The girl was from South Africa and was delightful. We chatted for quite a while, after she handled my concern (Surviving Ohio State was airing for the first time) and the tv guide did not show the title. I thought it was because Jim Jordan was in the documentary and I wanted the title in the guide to be able to DVR it. She had heard about the South African president's visit and did not believe whites were being discriminated against. I like to take the opportunity to find out from the local people their thoughts on immigration and other such topics.
Too bad this message isn't getting to the people that need to read it. Unfortunately, the supporters he has left are all racist white nationalists (read Nazis). The south, where I live, is flooded with these lovely human beings.
Steven...the exhaustion in this is real, and I share more of it than I usually let on.
You've nailed the thing that keeps me thinking at night: the people who most need to hear it are the LEAST likely to read it.
But...here's what I hold onto. I'm not really writing to convert the true believers...the cult members; I've made my peace with the fact that some doors...just won't open.
I'm writing for the much larger group...in the middle: the tired...the checked-out...the ones who haven't quite let themselves see it...yet.
They're reachable...and...there are more of them than the worst days suggest.
So...we keep putting the truth where they MIGHT stumble onto it...and we keep at it.
Thank you for standing in the gap with me...it matters more than you know.
A welcome bag, in my opinion, would be totally different. It would be pleasant and useful, not including literature based on prejudices or intent to manipulate minds.
At one time the person making the statements quoted was heard wishing aloud for immigrants from Sweden. Most, if not all, of the behaviors, wishes, and statements seem to indicate the individual’s idea of “cleansing” and steps toward genocide as we have read about in history. That type of attitude or collection of attitudes in no way defines America or what
Americans as a nation stand for, want, or represent.
Americans must wake up fast. Elections must be protected from federal interference, and somehow, our checks and balances must make up for lost time in taking the necessary steps to re-secure and protect our blessings of liberty and more. We must save America and its ideals for the freedoms for all as declared in our Constitution.
trump holds grudges. Several years ago he had dated two Black women. Not sure how the first affair ended, but the second one has been reported was with an Ethiopian super model named Iman. There are pictures online. She dropped him for David Bowie. He now hates Ethiopians.
Then came Elon Musk who no doubt lit a flame under him about South Africa and how the poor victimized son of an Emerald mine owner was victimized by Black South Africans.
We know he was a racist before that. He and his father, and probably his brothel-owning grandpa Drumpf before them.
But, Jack, I am barely over the last dental battle, and I just could have fractured another molar reading your Newsletter. I know it has been reported that some of the "refugees" have already headed home. Evidently they would rather face "genocide" than trump's economy. But no doubt some that stayed might be being swayed by his propaganda, or were already happy to jump on the band wagon. Can we find out who authored that pig slop?
Spot on. Indoctrination and inciting that racism is okay on arrival. A new Trumpian low.
White South Africans are being kept in their place whem the Revolting Apartheid broke down. Now they have to compete for jobs and face far less discrimination and violence than they perpetrated upon non whites.
Perhaps they could implement a deportation strategy to send the white Boers back to their home lands. It would have been very well deserved.
The offensiveness of this vile slice of an ant with a beeper is disturbing, disgraceful and despicable. Even more so are the other ants holding him up. No wonder our nation has gone from being a stronghold of humanity to the least appealing place on Earth. I’m keeping as calm as possible for my children and family just so I stay healthy enough to see him either incarcerated or just disappear. Steady as we go. Thank you Jack.
There are days when you wonder if things will ever come back to some passing example of normal. Life is not normal but I would like to have decency returned to our country where civil discourse can be brought back.I have vision of either a massive stroke or a fall and massive bleed occurs because he is taking 4 times the dose of aspirin. I would like to be alive to witness that or jail. I also want all the monstrosities gone especially where he put back the confederate statues. We can all try to make this happen.
The welcome bag is not a novelty. It is a document. Governments that select populations by race have always understood that the selection itself is only the first act. The second act is the story told to the newly arrived about why they were chosen — and why others were not. The third act, which follows reliably, is the story told to everyone else about what the chosen people represent. File the date when the 1776 Commission report became orientation material. Note which administration decided that new arrivals should receive, before they had unpacked a single belonging, a curated account of American history designed to cast suspicion on the Civil Rights Movement.
The historian notes something else. When the Department of Housing and Urban Development was created in 1965, Lyndon Johnson appointed Robert C. Weaver as its first secretary — making Weaver the first Black cabinet member in the history of the United States. The appointment was not incidental. HUD was created to address, specifically, the racial architecture of American housing: the redlining, the restrictive covenants, the systematic exclusion of Black families from the wealth-building mechanisms available to white ones. Johnson put a Black man at the head of a department designed to repair what racial hierarchy had built. The majority of HUD secretaries since have been people of color. That department now exists, under this administration, largely to be hollowed out.
The pattern is older than the current administration. It runs as follows. Identify a community whose votes or symbolic endorsement is useful. Make promises calibrated to their specific vulnerabilities — in this case, housing, opportunity, dignity. Place representatives of that community in visible positions. Then govern in the opposite direction of every promise made, relying on the visibility of the appointment to absorb criticism that the policy would otherwise attract. File the date when the department built to address Black housing inequality became an instrument of its reversal — staffed, at the top, by a Black secretary. Note which president this is.
Enslaved Black Americans built the White House with their hands. That is not a metaphor. It is a documented historical fact. The building that houses the executive power now being used to select refugees by race, to dismantle fair housing enforcement, and to distribute ideological literature to favored immigrant groups was constructed by people who were legally owned by other people — people who were told that their labor was essential and their citizenship was impossible. Jack is correct that the bag is a window into how power imagines the future. The historian adds only this: the present administration did not invent the idea that some people build the country and others inherit it. It inherited that idea. What is new is the openness with which it now acts on it.
The welcome bag makes the logic visible. A government that sends PragerU children’s books and the 1776 Commission report to white South Africans before they have slept a single night on American soil has already decided what it thinks history means — and who it thinks history is for. The votes of Black Americans were sought. The symbolic presence of Black appointees was deployed. The policies that followed told a different story than either the promises or the appointments suggested. That sequence is not accidental. It is a method. Historians have seen it before. The question worth sitting with — the one Jack’s piece raises and does not resolve, which is the correct editorial instinct — is whether the people on the receiving end of that method will read the signal before the method completes itself.
A friend posted this on Facebook years ago and I kept it in my notepad:
“ Whenever a Trump supporter asks you to "name one time Trump was racist," feel free to link to this....
1973: The Nixon administration sued Trump for refusing to rent to black people.
1980s: Trump's casinos were accused of hiding the black staff when Trump visited.
1989: Trump took out a full-page ad, arguing for the death penalty for a group of black men (The 'Central Park Five'), effectively putting a bounty on their heads, and plaguing them with a lifetime of death threats. He was sued by the Justice Department for discrimination.
1991: “Black guys counting my money! I hate it. The only kinds of people I want counting my money are short guys that wear yarmulkes every day… I think that the [black] guy is lazy. And it’s probably not his fault, because laziness is a trait in blacks. It really is.”
1992: Trump's casino was fined $200,000 for transferring black dealers off certain tables to appease racist patrons.
1993: Trump said Native American casinos shouldn’t be allowed because “they don’t look like Indians to me.”
2000: Trump ran a series of attack ads against Native American casinos alleging (with no proof) that they were guilty of crimes.
2004: Trump fired a black contestant from 'The Apprentice' for being over-educated.
2010: Trump argued in favor of segregating Muslims in Lower Manhattan.
2011: Birtherism. Trump alleged that Obama was Kenyan based on nothing but skin color. He never apologized nor renounced that claim.
2015 (1): Trump called Mexican immigrants "rapists" who are "bringing crime and drugs" to the U.S.
2015 (2): Trump called for "a ban on all Muslims entering the U.S."
2016 (1): Trump called for a Mexican judge to recuse himself based on nothing other than his race. Paul Ryan said this was “the textbook definition of a racist comment.”
2016 (2): Trump regularly retweeted material from white supremacists and neo-Nazis during his campaign.
2016 (3): Trump tweeted a picture alleging that Hillary was Jewish, or controlled by Jewish people.
2016 (4): The Trump campaign adopted Nixon's "Law and Order" rhetoric which was based in racial fearmongering.
2016 (5): Trump told black voters "What do you have to lose?"
2017 (1): Trump asked a reporter to set up a meeting with the black caucus simply because she was black.
2017 (2): "...some very fine people on both sides" said Trump of a violent Nazi rally.
2017 (3): Trump said people from Haiti "all have AIDS" and people from Nigeria would never “go back to their huts” after seeing America.
2018 (1): Trump called Haiti and African countries shitholes.
2018 (2): Trump referenced the trail of tears to mock Elizabeth Warren.
2019: Trump tweeted that four black and brown congresswomen should go back where they came from. Then attacked Elijah Cummings. Then Baltimore. Then Al Sharpton.
2020: Trump called black protesters "THUGS" just days after calling white protesters "very good people." Then he threatened to direct the military to shoot the black protestors in the street.”
Todd...what a thing to have kept in your back pocket all these years!
Thank you for posting it.
Reading it straight through does something NO single example ever can: it turns "isolated incident"...into an unmistakable PATTERN...which is exactly the point I was driving at today.
So many of these line up with what I documented this morning...and seeing them shoulder to shoulder...across five decades is its OWN kind of argument.
Grateful you're here, Todd...and grateful you're the kind of reader who keeps the receipts!
-Jack
Jack, I’m grateful to have you in my life.
Likewise, Todd.
-Jack
I think we all are grateful to have Jack in our lives, and Todd, I thank you for sharing the quotations you cited. I have forwarded them to myself.
Agree
I was thinking that a great project would be to update and enhance this list. We can make a comprehensive and living list of Trump’s bigotry and hatred.
We can create a list that can be easily shared.
Nothing if not consistent.
Bingo, Ellen!
-Jack
I picked up a local newspaper in the airport in Johannesburg around the time of the South African Prime Minister's visit to Washington. Trump was spewing his nonsense about the White South African refugees. A group was in the process of emigrating to the US. Among them, a spouse rejoining another spouse already living in the US. A farmer complaining that the South African government was after his farm. Turns out the government still trying to ameliorate the devastating aftermath of apartheid wanted to buy the land and had made him, according to the paper, a very fair offer which was rejected.
In the article, the reporters had interviewed a number of South Africans. They and my tour guides regarded the whole White African refugee matter with derision.
Trump's actions speak volumes about his racism. In the words of Ruth Ben-Ghiat, an objective of Trump and his backers is to create a White ethno-state.
Ellen..this is the kind of firsthand detail...that's worth more than a DOZEN press releases.
Thank you for carrying it back from Johannesburg!
What you picked up in that paper cuts right to the heart of it: a farmer who turned down a fair offer for his land...then recast an ocean away...as a persecuted refugee.
That's the WHOLE sleight of hand in a SINGLE anecdote.
And...the fact that South Africans themselves...your guides included...met the "refugee" story with open DERISION... tells you how threadbare it is...once you're standing on the actual ground.
The persecution narrative ONLY survives at a distance...where no one can check it against the people living it.
YOU were there to check it. Grateful you brought it here, Ellen!
-Jack
Thank you Jack. I'm grateful for the work you do.
During that same period of time, I was having problems with DISH tv. I called and of course customer service is not in the US. The girl was from South Africa and was delightful. We chatted for quite a while, after she handled my concern (Surviving Ohio State was airing for the first time) and the tv guide did not show the title. I thought it was because Jim Jordan was in the documentary and I wanted the title in the guide to be able to DVR it. She had heard about the South African president's visit and did not believe whites were being discriminated against. I like to take the opportunity to find out from the local people their thoughts on immigration and other such topics.
Too bad this message isn't getting to the people that need to read it. Unfortunately, the supporters he has left are all racist white nationalists (read Nazis). The south, where I live, is flooded with these lovely human beings.
Steven...the exhaustion in this is real, and I share more of it than I usually let on.
You've nailed the thing that keeps me thinking at night: the people who most need to hear it are the LEAST likely to read it.
But...here's what I hold onto. I'm not really writing to convert the true believers...the cult members; I've made my peace with the fact that some doors...just won't open.
I'm writing for the much larger group...in the middle: the tired...the checked-out...the ones who haven't quite let themselves see it...yet.
They're reachable...and...there are more of them than the worst days suggest.
So...we keep putting the truth where they MIGHT stumble onto it...and we keep at it.
Thank you for standing in the gap with me...it matters more than you know.
-Jack
I keep posting some of your articles on my social media account. Hopefully many will read them and a few influenced by them!
I appreciate your efforts and hope you are correct. The more input the better.
A welcome bag, in my opinion, would be totally different. It would be pleasant and useful, not including literature based on prejudices or intent to manipulate minds.
At one time the person making the statements quoted was heard wishing aloud for immigrants from Sweden. Most, if not all, of the behaviors, wishes, and statements seem to indicate the individual’s idea of “cleansing” and steps toward genocide as we have read about in history. That type of attitude or collection of attitudes in no way defines America or what
Americans as a nation stand for, want, or represent.
Americans must wake up fast. Elections must be protected from federal interference, and somehow, our checks and balances must make up for lost time in taking the necessary steps to re-secure and protect our blessings of liberty and more. We must save America and its ideals for the freedoms for all as declared in our Constitution.
#HOLDFAST AND FASTER!!!!!
Oh, it’s intentional. How could anything this conspicuous and constant NOT be??
#HoldFast
trump holds grudges. Several years ago he had dated two Black women. Not sure how the first affair ended, but the second one has been reported was with an Ethiopian super model named Iman. There are pictures online. She dropped him for David Bowie. He now hates Ethiopians.
Then came Elon Musk who no doubt lit a flame under him about South Africa and how the poor victimized son of an Emerald mine owner was victimized by Black South Africans.
We know he was a racist before that. He and his father, and probably his brothel-owning grandpa Drumpf before them.
But, Jack, I am barely over the last dental battle, and I just could have fractured another molar reading your Newsletter. I know it has been reported that some of the "refugees" have already headed home. Evidently they would rather face "genocide" than trump's economy. But no doubt some that stayed might be being swayed by his propaganda, or were already happy to jump on the band wagon. Can we find out who authored that pig slop?
#HoldFast
Sue
Spot on. Indoctrination and inciting that racism is okay on arrival. A new Trumpian low.
White South Africans are being kept in their place whem the Revolting Apartheid broke down. Now they have to compete for jobs and face far less discrimination and violence than they perpetrated upon non whites.
Perhaps they could implement a deportation strategy to send the white Boers back to their home lands. It would have been very well deserved.
The offensiveness of this vile slice of an ant with a beeper is disturbing, disgraceful and despicable. Even more so are the other ants holding him up. No wonder our nation has gone from being a stronghold of humanity to the least appealing place on Earth. I’m keeping as calm as possible for my children and family just so I stay healthy enough to see him either incarcerated or just disappear. Steady as we go. Thank you Jack.
Quick answer to your question, no. But I have sons and daughters who most definitely are, and I am scared to death for them.
There are days when you wonder if things will ever come back to some passing example of normal. Life is not normal but I would like to have decency returned to our country where civil discourse can be brought back.I have vision of either a massive stroke or a fall and massive bleed occurs because he is taking 4 times the dose of aspirin. I would like to be alive to witness that or jail. I also want all the monstrosities gone especially where he put back the confederate statues. We can all try to make this happen.
#HOLDFAST
Teri
Jack is correct.
The welcome bag is not a novelty. It is a document. Governments that select populations by race have always understood that the selection itself is only the first act. The second act is the story told to the newly arrived about why they were chosen — and why others were not. The third act, which follows reliably, is the story told to everyone else about what the chosen people represent. File the date when the 1776 Commission report became orientation material. Note which administration decided that new arrivals should receive, before they had unpacked a single belonging, a curated account of American history designed to cast suspicion on the Civil Rights Movement.
The historian notes something else. When the Department of Housing and Urban Development was created in 1965, Lyndon Johnson appointed Robert C. Weaver as its first secretary — making Weaver the first Black cabinet member in the history of the United States. The appointment was not incidental. HUD was created to address, specifically, the racial architecture of American housing: the redlining, the restrictive covenants, the systematic exclusion of Black families from the wealth-building mechanisms available to white ones. Johnson put a Black man at the head of a department designed to repair what racial hierarchy had built. The majority of HUD secretaries since have been people of color. That department now exists, under this administration, largely to be hollowed out.
The pattern is older than the current administration. It runs as follows. Identify a community whose votes or symbolic endorsement is useful. Make promises calibrated to their specific vulnerabilities — in this case, housing, opportunity, dignity. Place representatives of that community in visible positions. Then govern in the opposite direction of every promise made, relying on the visibility of the appointment to absorb criticism that the policy would otherwise attract. File the date when the department built to address Black housing inequality became an instrument of its reversal — staffed, at the top, by a Black secretary. Note which president this is.
Enslaved Black Americans built the White House with their hands. That is not a metaphor. It is a documented historical fact. The building that houses the executive power now being used to select refugees by race, to dismantle fair housing enforcement, and to distribute ideological literature to favored immigrant groups was constructed by people who were legally owned by other people — people who were told that their labor was essential and their citizenship was impossible. Jack is correct that the bag is a window into how power imagines the future. The historian adds only this: the present administration did not invent the idea that some people build the country and others inherit it. It inherited that idea. What is new is the openness with which it now acts on it.
The welcome bag makes the logic visible. A government that sends PragerU children’s books and the 1776 Commission report to white South Africans before they have slept a single night on American soil has already decided what it thinks history means — and who it thinks history is for. The votes of Black Americans were sought. The symbolic presence of Black appointees was deployed. The policies that followed told a different story than either the promises or the appointments suggested. That sequence is not accidental. It is a method. Historians have seen it before. The question worth sitting with — the one Jack’s piece raises and does not resolve, which is the correct editorial instinct — is whether the people on the receiving end of that method will read the signal before the method completes itself.
#HOLDFAST