Family Values
There is a famous televised Public Service Announcement called Like Father, Like Son that came out in the summer of 1987 as a part of the U.S. anti-drug campaign. A father finds drugs and drug paraphernalia in his son’s bedroom and angrily confronts the boy. The dad demands to know how he learned to use drugs, and the son shouts back, “You, alright? I learned it by watching you!” The narrator concludes with the message, “Parents who use drugs have children who use drugs.” The same can be said of racism. Parents who are racist have children who are racist. Or as anti-apartheid activist and South African President Nelson Mandela beautifully wrote in his book, Long Walk to Freedom:
“No one is born hating another person because of the color of his skin, or his background, or his religion. People must learn to hate, and if they can learn to hate, they can be taught to love, for love comes more naturally to the human heart than its opposite.”
On Memorial Day in 1927 in Queens, New York, a parade for fallen soldiers turned into a riot between 1,000 Ku Klux Klan members and 100 New York Police Officers. Before the parade, the Klan passed around fliers claiming, “Native-born Protestant Americans” were being “assaulted by Roman Catholic police of New York City” and that “Liberty and Democracy have been trampled upon when native-born Protestant Americans dare to organize to protect one flag, the American flag; one school, the public school; and one language, the English language.” Seven Klan arrests were made that day and the Long Island Daily Press reported that all seven of the arrestees were “berobed marchers,” wearing Klan attire. One of the seven men arrested was a twenty-one-year-old Fred Trump, who eventually became the father of Donald Trump. Fred “was dismissed on a charge of refusing to disperse from a parade when ordered to do so.”
Fred Trump not only avoided serving in WWII, but he lied about his family’s German heritage, falsely claiming that the Trump family was originally from Sweden. This lie persisted for decades and was even included in his son Donald’s 1987 book The Art of the Deal where he claims his grandfather “came here from Sweden as a child.” It is believed that Fred made up this lie to protect his real estate business and his family as many of his tenants and clients were Jewish. During the war, Fred Trump built barracks and apartments for the U.S. Navy on the eastern seaboard and thousands of apartments in New York City. In 1954, Trump was investigated by a U.S. Senate committee for war profiteering from public contracts, including overstating charges and abusing the FHA loans he had received. One of the properties Trump profited from by overstating the construction expenses was his Beach Haven apartment complex in Brooklyn. Famous American folksinger Woodie Guthrie lived in those apartments and wrote a song in 1954 to protest Trump’s racist exclusion of black tenants called “Old Man Trump.”
I suppose that Old Man Trump knows just how much racial hate
He stirred up in that bloodpot of human hearts
When he drawed that color line
Here at his Beach Haven family project
Guthrie went on to write, “Beach Haven is Trump’s Tower Where no black folks come to roam, No, no, Old Man Trump! Old Beach Haven ain’t my home!”
In October 1973, the U.S. Justice Department filed a civil rights case against Fred Trump, Donald Trump, and their real estate company. At the time, Donald Trump was a 27-year-old and President of the Trump Management Corporation, responsible for day-to-day operations, including real estate development and rentals. The complaint alleged that the Trump’s and their firm had committed systemic violations of the Fair Housing Act of 1968. The allegations included evidence from black and white “testers” who had sought to rent apartments; the white testers were told of vacancies; the black testers were not or were steered to apartment complexes with a higher proportion of racial minorities. The complaint also alleged that Trump employees had placed codes (the letter “C” for “colored”) next to housing applicant names to indicate if they were black or Latino. After two years, the matter settled with a consent decree, prohibiting the Trumps from “discriminating against any person in the terms, conditions, or privileges of sale or rental of a dwelling.” The Justice Department called the decree “one of the most far-reaching ever negotiated.”
Donald Trump became involved in the Central Park Five case in 1989, shortly after the arrest of five Black and Latino teenagers — Kevin Richardson, Raymond Santana, Antron McCray, Yusef Salaam, and Korey Wise — who were accused of brutally raping a white jogger, Trisha Meili, in Central Park. Trump’s involvement took the form of a high-profile media campaign that amplified the public outrage surrounding the case.
In the immediate aftermath of the arrests, Trump took out full-page ads in four major New York City newspapers, including The New York Times and The Daily News. The ads, costing about $85,000, called for the reinstatement of the death penalty in New York and expressed extreme views about crime and punishment. Trump’s message reflected and reinforced the widespread public anger, describing the teenagers as threats to society.
The ad read:
“I want to hate these muggers and murderers. They should be forced to suffer… I want to bring back the death penalty. I want to bring back our police!”
Years later, in 2002, DNA evidence and a confession from Matias Reyes, a convicted serial rapist, exonerated the Central Park Five. However, despite the teenagers’ exoneration and a $41 million settlement from New York City, Trump never apologized or acknowledged the wrongful conviction. In 2019, when asked about the settlement, Trump said, “You have people on both sides of that. They admitted their guilt. If you look at some of the prosecutors, they think that the city never should have settled that case — so we’ll leave it at that.” Even as recently as the 2024 Presidential Debate Trump continued to insist the teenagers were guilty when he said, “They admitted — they said, they pled guilty. And I said, well, if they pled guilty they badly hurt a person, killed a person ultimately.” Not only has the Central Park Five been completely exonerated, but the truth is — they never pled guilty — they were coerced into confessing, and the victim was not killed — she is still alive. Trump is so racist that he is still lying about this to this day and is unwilling to admit his wrong or apologize.
In 1990, Vanity Fair ran an article about Donald Trump and his wife Ivana’s very public divorce. In that article, it details how Ivana claimed Donald likes to read a book of Hitler’s collected speeches, My New Order, which he keeps in a cabinet by his bed. The interviewer asked Trump who gave him Hitler’s speeches and Trump said, “Actually, it was my friend Marty Davis from Paramount who gave me a copy of Mein Kampf, and he’s a Jew.” The interviewer followed up with Marty Davis who said, “I did give him a book about Hitler, but it was My New Order, Hitler’s speeches, not Mein Kampf. I thought he would find it interesting. I am his friend, but I’m not Jewish.” So, Ivana was right. She also shared that when Trump’s cousin, John Walter, from his father’s German side of the family visits Donald in his office, he clicks his heels and says, “Heil Hitler,” possibly as a family joke. I don’t know anyone who would find that funny except people who are or who want to be Fascists.
Given Trump’s upbringing and lifelong pattern of racism, it should not surprise us that he was the one who challenged the citizenship, legitimacy, loyalty to America, and intellect of the United State’s first black President with zero evidence or basis for his argument. Trump attacked Obama and questioned his birthplace because Trump is a racist. There does not appear to be a racist line that Trump is not willing to cross. We don’t have to make complex and nuanced arguments or do any wild contortions to prove that Donald Trump, in the words of his own running mate J.D. Vance, is “America’s Hitler.” Trump makes it perfectly clear who he is, what he believes, and what he intends to do. In December of last year, Trump spoke to a crowd in New Hampshire about America’s non-white immigrants and claimed in unscripted remarks, “they’re poisoning the blood of our country.” Hitler wrote a similar phrase in Mein Kampf, which laid out his racist political ideology, “All great cultures of the past perished only because the originally creative race died out from blood poisoning.” Trump literally quoted Hitler on the campaign trail.
One ludicrous defense I keep hearing about Trump is that he can’t be a Fascist because he supports Israel and the Jews. First of all, Nazi Germany wasn’t just against the Jews, they were against anyone who was not white, Anglo Saxon, protestant, heterosexual, and fully able. Never forget that Hitler wanted to ban black athletes from the 1936 Berlin Olympics because it would undermine his case for superiority of the Aryan race. African American Jesse Owens did exactly that when he won four Gold Medals. Trump is focusing all of his hate and racism on black and brown immigrants. His calls for mass deportations and using U.S. military force to make it happen are straight out of Hitler’s playbook. Voting for Trump is voting for putting families — including women, children, and elderly in military camps and forcing them out of America.
So, when Trump’s own top military leader, General Mark Milley, who Trump personally appointed to that position and Trump’s longest serving Chief of Staff, former Secretary of Homeland Security, and 4-Star Marine Corps General John Kelly respectively say Trump is a “fascist to the core” and Trump “definitely meets the definition of a fascist,” we should believe them. When Kelly says that Trump told him, “Well, Hitler did some good things,” it stands to reason, and it fits a consistent pattern of behavior we have seen from Trump throughout his entire adult life. Donald Trump was not born a racist, he was raised to be one just like his father. Many times, parents who are racist have children who are racist. The good news is, “they can be taught to love.”
