Black people, Donald Trump believes, are pitted against whites in a zero-sum game, according to the president’s biographer in an interview with “The Daily Beast” podcast.
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The validity of Wolff’s insights into the president’s psyche is up for debate. For the latter book, published in 2018, the controversial author said he spent three hours interviewing him. Trump claimed to have given the author “zero access” to the White House.
“I never spoke to him for the book,” Trump said. “Full of lies, misrepresentations and sources that don’t exist.”
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“Trump certainly regards Black people as profoundly different from white people,” Wolff told the Daily Beast. “I mean the word racist now becomes in the Trump world a kind of high praise, because it’s meant to suggest the liberal overreach and the liberals call anybody racist.”
Trump established his credibility with far-right conservatives when he pushed the scurrilous rumor that Barack Obama was not born in the U.S. The real estate developer claimed he sent investigators to Hawaii to find Obama’s birth certificate, which Obama eventually released.
In 2016, when he first ran for president, Trump routinely retweeted white supremacists and neo-Nazis who had endorsed him. Following the Unite the Right rally Charlottesville, Virginia, in 2017 in which a counter-protester was killed by a white supremacist who drove his car into a crowd, the president claimed there were “some very fine people” on “both sides,” drawing praise for “defending the truth” from white nationalist Richard Spencer.
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Echoing his claims about Obama, Trump suggested that Kamala Harris, who’s Black and South Asian, “doesn’t meet the requirements” to be Joe Biden’s running mate.
Race has played a significant role in Trump’s second-term agenda. He has gutted DEI (diversity, equity and inclusion) policies at public institutions and universities. With a majority of his supporters believing racism against white people is a bigger problem than racism against Black people, Trump has ordered the Department of Justice to focus its attention on anti-white bias.
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Allegations of Trump’s racism extend well before his foray into politics. In 1973, the Trump Management Corporation was sued by the Department of Justice for violating the Fair Housing Act after claims that it had refused to rent to Black tenants. Trump claimed the federal government was trying to force him to rent to welfare recipients.
And he continues to claim the Central Park Five, a group of mostly Black teenagers, raped a white jogger in 1989 even though they were all fully exonerated in 2002.
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