Republican presidential front-runner Donald Trump may have failed to disavow the Ku Klux Klan this weekend, but he'll have you know he is not racist.
this weekend, but he'll have you know he is not racist. In fact, he claims to be “the least racist personthat you have ever met,” and last summer he pulled out the old standbyabout not having a racist bone in his body.
But he hasn’t given us a lot of reason to believe that. In fact, despite Trump’s protests to the contrary, he has a long history of saying and doing racist things. It's not really surprising that he's won the support and praise of the country’s white supremacists.
Here’s a running list of some of the most glaringly racist things associated with Trump. We’re sure we’ll be adding to it soon.
The Justice Department sued his company -- twice -- for not renting to black people
When Trump was serving as the president of his family's real estate company, the Trump Management Corporation, in 1973, the Justice Department sued the company for alleged racial discriminationagainst black people looking to rent apartments in Brooklyn, Queens and Staten Island.
The lawsuit charged that the company quoted different rental terms and conditions to black rental candidates than it did with white candidates, and that the company lied to black applicants about apartments not being available. Trump called those accusations “absolutely ridiculous” and sued the Justice Department for $100 million in damages for defamation.
Without admitting wrongdoing, the Trump Management Corporation settled the original lawsuit two years later and promised not to discriminate against black people, Puerto Ricans or other minorities. Trump also agreed to send weekly vacancy lists for his 15,000 apartments to the New York Urban League, a civil rights group, and to allow the NYUL to present qualified applicants for vacancies in certain Trump properties.
Just three years after that, the Justice Department sued the Trump Management Corporation again for allegedly discriminating against black applicantsby telling them apartments weren’t available.
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He refused to condemn the white supremacists who are campaigning for him
Three times in a row on Sunday, Trump sidestepped opportunities to renounce white nationalist and former KKK leader David Duke, who told his radio audience last week that voting for any candidate other than Trump is " really treason to your heritage."
When asked by CNN’s Jake Tapper if he would condemn Duke and say he didn’t want a vote from him or any other white supremacists, Trump claimed that he didn’t know anything about white supremacists or about Duke himself. When Tapper pressed him twice more, Trump said he couldn’t condemn a group he hadn’t yet researched.
By Monday, Trump was sayingthat in fact he does disavow Duke, and that the only reason he didn't do so on CNN was because of a "lousy earpiece." Video of the exchange, however, shows Trump responding quickly to Tapper's questions with no apparent difficulty in hearing.
It’s preposterous to think that Trump doesn't know about white supremacist groups or their sometimes violent support of him. Reports of neo-Nazi groups rallying around Trump go back as far as August.
His white supremacist fan clubincludes the Daily Stormer, a leading neo-Nazi news site; Richard Spencer, director of the National Policy Institute, which aims to promote the “heritage, identity, and future of European people”; Jared Taylor, editor of American Renaissance, a Virginia-based white nationalist magazine; Michael Hill, head of the League of the South, an Alabama-based white supremacist secessionist group; and Brad Griffin, a member of Hill’s League of the South and author of the popular white supremacist blog Hunter Wallace.