Donald Trump’s campaign is powered by the racist alt-right. But racism and Donald Trump are not a new thing. Racism was with him from the start. In a lot of ways it defined Donald Trump.
… Donald, 17, would soon enroll at Fordham University in the Bronx, living at his parents’ home in Queens and spending much of his free time touring construction sites in his father’s Cadillac, driven by a black chauffeur. …
Over the next decade, as Donald J. Trump assumed an increasingly prominent role in the business, the company’s practice of turning away potential black tenants was painstakingly documented by activists and organizations that viewed equal housing as the next frontier in the civil rights struggle.
What liberal, Democratic administration was it that accused Trump of racist practices? That would be the Nixon administration, hardly the most activist team when protecting the rights of minorities. But Trump’s actions were so easily documented, so much the textbook definition of racism as Paul Ryan might say, that they couldn’t be overlooked. And the practices weren’t new. Before Donald took the helm his father, Fred, had been tossing the applications of black tenants, and when the New York Commission on Human Rights looked into it ...
After the hearing, Ms. Brown was offered an apartment in the Wilshire, and in the spring of 1964, she moved in. For 10 years, she said, she was the only African-American in the building.
In Donald’s case, Rather than confess and pay, Donald Trump hired Joe McCarthy’s lawyer, Roy Cohn, who filed a countersuit of $100 million against the government. It was laughed out of court.
Donald and his father weren’t the only ones in the Trump organization with racist attitudes. It was baked in. Rental agents were told to lose black applications. Doormen were told to tell prospective black applicants that there were no openings.
Donald Trump praised one of those agents in particular.
… in “The Art of the Deal,” he praised Mr. Wolper, without using his surname, calling him a “fabulous man” and “an amazing manager.”
“Irving was a classic,” Mr. Trump wrote.
This was the man Trump called “a classic.”
After the agent, Irving Wolper, offered the testers an apartment, they brought in Mr. Cash. Mr. Wolper grew furious, shoving them out of the office and calling the young female tester, Maggie Durham, a “nigger-lover,” according to court records.
“To this day I have not forgotten the fury in his voice and in his face,” Ms. Durham recalled recently, adding that she also remembered him calling her a “traitor to the race.”
That’s classic, all right. Classic Trump organization.
A few years later, the government accused the Trumps of violating the consent decree. “We believe that an underlying pattern of discrimination continues to exist in the Trump Management organization,” a Justice Department lawyer wrote to Mr. Cohn in 1978.
Once again, the government marshaled numerous examples of blacks being denied Trump apartments. But this time, it also identified a pattern of racial steering.
It didn’t end then. It hasn’t ended now.