Welcome to 2018. One of the nation's newspapers of record, The Washington Post, is committed to documenting day-by-day the lies of the current occupier of the Oval Office. We're well over 2,000 for his first year in office as of today. The other major paper of record, The New York Times, has compiled the "definitive list" of Trump's racism.
The media often falls back on euphemisms when describing Trump's comments about race: racially loaded, racially charged, racially tinged, racially sensitive. And Trump himself has claimed that he is "the least racist person." But here's the truth: Donald Trump is a racist. He talks about and treats people differently based on their race. He has done so for years, and he is still doing so.
Of course, it can't be a really definitive list, because it can only document Trump's racist words and actions that are public. But there's more than enough that's been out in the public eye for decades to demonstrate what's in Trump's ugly, ugly heart. Starting in the ‘70s, when his real-estate company "tried to avoid renting apartments to African-Americans in the 1970s and gave preferential treatment to whites, according to the federal government."
He's always treated black employees differently from whites. A former hotel executive remembers him saying about a black accountant, "Black guys counting my money! I hate it. … I think that the guy is lazy. And it's probably not his fault, because laziness is a trait in blacks." In an interview on NBC in 1989, he said, out loud and for the record. "I think sometimes a black may think they don’t have an advantage or this and that. I've said on one occasion, even about myself, if I were starting off today, I would love to be a well-educated black, because I really believe they do have an actual advantage."
His racist animus to President Barack Obama—he's called him lazy, questioned his American birth, his Christian faith, and his intelligence—fueled his bid for the White House which famously kicked off with his speech disparaging Mexican immigrants as criminals and "rapists."
Beyond being a run-of-the-mill racist—and every person of color is included in that, regardless of national origin and that includes Native Americans—he's a white supremacist. That's reflected in his anti-semitism, on full display during the campaign when he used the dog whistle "Hillary Clinton meets in secret with international banks to plot the destruction of U.S. sovereignty." "International banks" is code for Jews among white-supremacists and would-be Nazis. He retweets white supremacists, he supported white supremacist Roy Moore for office, and says some of them are "very fine people," the words he used to excuse the murderous white supremacists who marched in Charlotteville, Virginia, with their torches and fascist chants.
The list the Times provides is more than adequate to demonstrate what Trump is, and is absolutely worth reading and bookmarking. It needs to be required reading for every reporter covering the White House—especially the Time's own reporters. This is the lens through which every one of Trump's actions and statements has to be regarded. We need to frankly and openly deal with that—and the fact that the governing party of the nation has fully embraced it—to deal with what Republicans are doing to the country.