Donald Trump’s biographer has given some insights into the way he thinks the president perceives the Black community.
“Clearly, he has some issue with Black people,” Michael Wolff told The Daily Beast Podcast on Thursday. “The world is a better place to him without Black people, or without having to be aware of Black people, without Black people somehow in what he considers a zero sum game with white people.”
The president has a long history of incendiary rhetoric and actions described by his critics as racist, though he stringently denies those allegations and even told reporters back in 2018 he was “the least racist person you have ever interviewed.”
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In 1973, the Department of Justice sued Trump and his companies for discriminating against Black renters, and under the Obama administration he was one of the most vocal proponents of the “birther” conspiracy theory.
He’s also continued to maintain that the Central Park Five, a group of mostly Black teenagers, were responsible for the rape of a white woman in 1989, despite all five men having been fully exonerated in 2002.
He launched his 2016 election campaign with a speech accusing Mexico of deliberately sending “criminals” and “rapists” across the border into the United States.
The following year, he described participants at a white supremacist rally in Charlottesville, Virginia, as “very fine people,” before in 2018 referring to African countries as “s---holes” during an Oval Office meet about immigration.
“Trump certainly regards Black people as profoundly different from white people,” Wolff further said during his sit-down with 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.”
