Legacy of discrimination spurs Trump’s attacks on Harris’ father

Lately, dispersed among his increasingly unhinged rants, Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump has attacked Democratic presidential nominee Kamala Harris’ father, referring to him as a “Marxist” and challenging voters to ask, “what (Kamala Harris’) ideology is” as though she is a sleeper agent programmed by her father decades ago.

Despite their appeal to MAGA and QAnon conspiracy theorists, Trump’s attacks on Harris’ father are absurd. Her father’s public discussions of Marxist economic theories were born of his role as professor who studied the economic systems of developing nations, many of which were, at that time, built on principles of Marxism.

While Trump’s conspiracies tell us little about Kamala Harris’ ideologies, they reveal much about Trump’s own deeply held white supremacist beliefs and the values instilled in him by his father, Fred.

According to a New York Times article from Memorial Day 1927, Fred Trump was arrested at a Ku Klux Klan March in which 1,000 white-robed Klansmen incited a brawl on the streets of the Jamaican neighborhood of Queens in New York City. In total, seven Klansmen people were arrested, including Trump’s father.

Asked about the incident in 2016, Donald Trump did what he does best — he lied and repeatedly claimed that not only was his father never arrested, but he also wasn’t even present at the rally. He also noted that “there was nobody charged” in the incident.

Subsequent reporting confirmed that the Fred Trump arrested in 1927 had the same name, home address and was even married to the same woman as Trump’s father. Moreover, while Fred Trump was eventually released without charges, news reports from 1927 state that all seven of the men arrested were wearing Klan attire and that three — presumably the leaders — were charged.

Moreover, Fred Trump’s participation in a Klan march was not the careless act of an impressionable 21-year-old swept up in a moment in time.

As Fred Trump built his real estate empire, he engaged in overt racial profiling and championed discriminatory policies and practices that increased his personal profits at the expense of Black New Yorkers.

In 1950, folk singer Woody Guthrie was among Fred Trump’s tenants when he wrote about the “color line” created by Trump in Brooklyn. “I suppose Old Man Trump knows just how much racial hate he stirred up in the bloodpot of human hearts when he drawed that color line here at his eighteen hundred family project,” wrote Guthrie in the lyrics to an unpublished song.

Just a few years later, in 1954, the U.S. Senate Banking Committee opened an investigation into Fred Trump for financial misconduct, discriminatory practices and other abuses of a federal housing program.

Then, in 1973, the U.S. Department of Justice sued Fred Trump, Donald Trump and the family’s real estate company, Trump Management, for discriminating against Black renters. The lawsuit alleged that Trump Management had systematically refused to rent apartments in its buildings to Blacks by lying about unit availability.

The investigation revealed that Black applicants were often told that no apartments were available, while white applicants were shown units immediately. The case was settled in 1975 with a consent decree, in which the Trumps did not admit guilt but were required to take steps to prevent future discrimination.

Unfortunately, when it comes to Fred and Donald Trump, the apple didn’t fall far from the tree, and Donald Trump took up his father’s discriminatory practices without hesitation.

In 1978, just three years after entering the consent decree and with Donald Trump now fully in charge of the Trump real estate empire, the DOJ once again charged the Trump Organization with discrimination after it was revealed that rental applications were secretly marked with the applicant’s race and doormen were coached to discourage Black people from renting.

Allegations of racial discrimination by Donald Trump did not end there. In 1992, the Trump Plaza Hotel and Casino in Atlantic City was ordered to pay a $200,000 fine for removing Black card dealers from the floor at the request of a high-rolling gambler.

But perhaps the most well-known instance of overt racism by Donald Trump came in 1983, when he took out full-page ads in several New York City newspapers that called for the death penalty for Black and Latino teenagers that were falsely accused of a brutal sexual assault. Despite DNA tests proving the innocence of the teens arrested and the confession of a known murderer and rapist who admitted to perpetrating the heinous crime, Trump has still refused to apologize for those advertisements or acknowledge the teen’s innocence.

Asked about the “Central Park Five” ads in 2019, Trump told a journalist, “You have people on both sides of that.” Those were the same words he used to offer support for participants of a 2017 white supremacist march in Charlottesville, Va., in which a young woman was murdered.

Just like his father, Donald Trump is a racist who can’t help but offer his support for Klansmen and Klan marches.

Perhaps this explains Donald Trump’s recent descent into full and complete madness: Not only did Joe Biden drop out of the presidential race and pass the baton to a younger, smarter, more accomplished and dare we say, more attractive opponent than Donald Trump, she is also Black. Donald Trump was already a sore loser, but perhaps the thought of losing to a Black woman — the type of person he has spent his life trying to hold down and oppress — is more than he can handle given his white supremacist roots.

The next time Donald Trump tries to drag Kamala Harris’ father — who didn’t even raise her for most of her life — into the political arena, don’t forget that his father and his Klan robes and their lifelong discrimination against Black Americans are hanging right behind his son.