Only hours ago, in an interview with Jake Tapper on CNN, Donald Trump repeatedly refused to repudiate a political endorsement of Trump’s candidacy from KKK leader David Duke, pleading ignorance of Duke and what he represents (white supremacy):
“I don't know anything about David Duke. I don't know what you're even talking about with white supremacy or white supremacist,” claimed Trump.
Doubling down, he suggested total ignorance of the very existence of the Ku Klux Klan, telling Tapper, “I don't know what group you're talking about. You wouldn't want me to condemn a group that I know nothing about.”
There’s a history here.
First, as Michele Goldberg aptly points out, back in 2000 when he was flirting with a presidential bid, Trump explicitly rejected running as a Reform Party candidate because that party included KKK leader David Duke. “This is not company I wish to keep”, Trump told the New York Times.
Goldberg’s takeaway? — Donald Trump Can’t Disavow the KKK Because It Might Demoralize His Base
But there’s more.
As Philip Bump of the Washington Post showcases, in 1927 following New York City riots in Queens and the Bronx instigated by Ku Klux Klan members and supporters of Italian fascism, several individuals were arrested in conjunction with the riots.
One appears to have been, as Bump documents, Donald Trump’s father Fred Trump. By the late 1940s, Fred Trump was a flourishing real estate developer profiting heavily from the pro-WW2 vet largesse of the federal government.
As iconic folk singer and WW2 veteran Woodie Guthrie learned, after renting an apartment in Fred Trump’s FHA-supported Beach Haven, NY apartment complex, Trump did not rent to African-Americans, veterans included.
In short, racist, government-supported public housing built the fortune that launched Donald Trump. Fred Trump did not originate the segregationist rental policy, but he did enforce it.
Historian Will Kaufman, digging through material at the Woodie Guthrie Archive, found several song lyric writings from Woodie Guthrie that attacked Fred Trump’s racist rental policy:
I suppose
Old Man Trump knows
Just how much
Racial Hate
he stirred up
In the bloodpot of human hearts
When he drawed
That color line
Here at his
Eighteen hundred family project ....
How fitting, that Woody Guthrie’s word should arise, long after his death, to condemn the Trump lineage.
A low estimate of the sum Donald Trump inherited directly from his father in the 1970s is $40 million dollars that, invested prudently, might have produced a fortune of 3-4 billion dollars today - which is in the ballpark of Donald Trump’s estimated fortune.
There’s no need to belabor the record of Donald Trump’s numerous, explicitly racist comments made in pursuit of the U.S. presidency. What these new developments make quite clear is this:
1. Donald Trump has, at the very least, intentionally harnessed racism, as a key element of his campaign.
2. Trump’s personal fortune was built on institutionalized racism.
Is Donald Trump truly the “least racist” person one might ever meet, as Trump billed himself to CNN’s Don Lemon ? Now that we have some more perspective on the matter, America will judge that claim.