Believe What You See and Hear-- Trump is a Racist

Maya Angelou once said, "When someone shows you who they are, believe them the first time. People know themselves much better than you do. That's why it's important to stop expecting them to be something other than who they are." 

According to interviews with more than two dozen current and former officials in the Trump administration, Donald Trump in private is...exactly what you seems to be-- if not worse. 

Greg Miller of Wapo is reporting that in unguarded moments with senior aides, Donald Trump has maintained that Black Americans have mainly themselves to blame in their struggle for equality, hindered more by lack of initiative than societal impediments.

After phone calls with Jewish lawmakers, Trump has muttered that Jews “are only in it for themselves” and “stick together” in an ethnic allegiance that exceeds other loyalties, officials said.  Trump’s private musings about Hispanics match the vitriol he has displayed in public, and his antipathy to Africa is so ingrained that when first lady Melania Trump planned a 2018 trip to that continent he railed that he “could never understand why she would want to go there.

None of this comes as a surprise.  Trump said at a private White House meeting in June 2017, Haitians “all have AIDS” and Nigerians would never “go back to their huts” once they came to the United States.  His attacks on women of color, specifically elected Democratic women of color, his exhortations that they should “go back to where they came from” and his characterization of poor African nations as “shithole” countries should have been no surprise, either.

No matter what Trump's apologists say, the outspoken racism of this president and the administration he controls could never be mistaken for “‘posturing.”  As detailed by Ibram X. Kendi, writing this month in The Atlantic, racism has been the guidepost of nearly all of Trump’s domestic policies from day one. With a constant and obvious goal of eliminating all of the achievements of the nation’s first Black President (as Kendi describes it) Trump “would make it seem as if a Black man had never been president, erasing him from history by repealing and replacing his signature accomplishments."