The Real Donald Trump Emerges

By Donald V. Watkins

©Copyrighted and Published on November 3, 2018

Michael Cohen’s interview with Vanity Fair’s Emily Jane Fox last week confirms what many Americans already knew about President Donald J. Trump – he is a dyed in the wool racist. Cohen, who was Trump’s personal lawyer and “fixer,” gave four credible examples of Trump’s racist words and behavior.

One incident involved the first season of The Apprentice. Trump had to choose between finalists Bill Rancic and Kwame Jackson. “Trump was explaining his back-and-forth about not picking Jackson,” Cohen said. Jackson is an African-American investment manager who graduated from Harvard Business School. “[Trump] said, ‘There’s no way I can let this black

fag win’,” according to Cohen.

Another incident occurred in 2016 when Cohen mentioned to candidate Trump that his campaign rally crowd “looked vanilla on television.” According to Cohen, Trump shot back, “That’s because black people are too stupid to vote for me.”

Shortly after the death of South African President Nelson Mandela, Trump said to Cohen, “Name one country run by a black person that’s not a shithole,” adding, “Name one city,” Cohen said. After Trump became president, he repeated the “shithole” comment in a meeting with Senators.

Cohen also recounted a conversation he had with Trump in the late 2000s, while they were traveling to Chicago for a Trump International Hotel board meeting. “We were going from the airport to the hotel, and we drove through what looked like a rougher neighborhood. Trump made a comment to me, saying that only the blacks could live like this.”

None of these revelations is shocking. Trump’s racist words have matched his racist actions for a very long time. Furthermore, Trump’s engrained racism hides in plain sight.

Indicia of Racism

Trump’s White House staff is all-white. His cabinet has one token African-American – Ben Carson -- who has outsourced executive decision-making in his department to top white deputies selected by the Trump White House.

As President, Trump called fired African-America staffer Omarose Manigault Newman a “dog” and a prominent African-American Congresswoman Maxine Waters a “low IQ” person.

Last year, Trump disparaged Congressman John Lewis, a civil rights icon who was viciously beaten by Alabama Governor George Wallace’s state troopers on “Bloody Sunday”, as “All talk, talk, talk - no action or results” and attacked verbally him for representing a Georgia district that Trump claimed was “crime infested” and “falling apart.”

In 2016, Trump indicated that the "Central Park Five" were guilty in a notorious 1989 rape case. Trump took out a full-page ad at the time of the crime calling for the State of New York to reinstate the death penalty in response.

The five defendants were convicted as teenagers after implicating each other under intense questioning over a brutal sexual assault on a jogger that dominated the tabloids. Defenders said they were coerced into confessing. Four of the Central Park Five were black and one was Latino while the victim was a white banker.

All five were cleared decades later by DNA evidence and a separate confession in 2002 from another criminal who took credit for the assault. In 2014, New York also paid them $41 million in a settlement over their ordeal.

Yet, Trump wanted the "Central Park Five" put to death despite the DNA evidence and voluntary confession from the real perpetrator.

Last year, a violent group of neo-Nazi protesters in Charlottesville, Virginia took to the streets and chanted, “Jews will not replace us.” One of the Nazis murdered Heather Heyer, an innocent counter-protester. Yet, President Donald J. Trump quickly declared that there were “good” people among the neo-Nazi group.

Last month, Trump praised Confederate General Robert E. Lee during his campaign rallies. As noted by historians, General Lee not only fought for the American flag early in his military career, he also fought against it during the Civil War. By traditional definitions of the term, General Lee was a “traitor” who was saved from hanging by a forgiving President Abraham Lincoln and Union General Ulysses S. Grant. Yet, Trump reveres General Lee and all that he stood for, as do so many white Southerners who long for a return to the “good ole days" when the institution of slavery and the Jim Crowe era defined daily life for African-Americans in the South.

Presently, Trump is using every opportunity to vilify and dehumanize a caravan of migrants of color from Central America who are marching to the U.S. to seek political asylum.. He has labeled them as “gang members”, “terrorists”, “thugs” and “drug dealers”, without offering any evidence to support these claims. He ran an overtly racist ad attacking their efforts to seek political asylum in the U.S.

In reality, these migrants are desperate men, women, and children who are fleeing gang violence and abject poverty in their countries.

A few days ago, Trump authorized U.S. soldiers to shoot these unarmed migrants if they threw rocks at them at the border. Trump’s authorization was intended to produce a modern-day version of the “Mỹ Lai Massacre”where U.S. Army soldiers massacred between 347 and 504 unarmed men, women, and children on March 16, 1968 in Sơn Tịnh District, South Vietnam on direct orders from Lieutenant William Calley, Jr., a platoon leader in Army C Company.

After intense criticism from retired military officers, Trump walked back his “shoot-to-kill” order the next day. It is presently unknown whether any American soldier would have complied with Trump’s “shoot-to-kill” order.

We must all remember that Trump bragged during the 2016 presidential campaign about killing people when he said: "I could stand in the middle of Fifth Avenue and shoot somebody and I wouldn't lose any voters." Trump appears to be right on this point because his diehard supporters readily embrace all of his controversial words and actions toward people of color.

Trump's Self-Portrait is Complete

After two years as president, the real Donald Trump’ has finally emerged. The self-portrait he has painted depicts a sick and demented man who hates women, Jews, gays, transgender Americans, Muslims, and people of color, whether African-American citizens or immigrants.

Interestingly, Trump’s father exhibited the same bigoted traits and routinely discriminated against people of color. Apparently, the father successfully passed these traits on to his cold-hearted son.

PHOTO: In 2016, Republican presidential candidate Donald J. Trump disclaimed that he is a racist in an interview with CNN's Don Lemon. Trump's words and actions have proven otherwise.