The Orange One finally gave a half assed condemnation of the Racist gathering and violence at Charlottesville, VA.
It took more than 48 hours, but President Donald Trump finally denounced the white supremacist groups whose rally in Charlottesville, Virginia, this past weekend sparked deadly violence.
But his Monday proclamation that “racism is evil” means little coming from a man who largely has not backed away from the racism upon which he built both his campaign and his real estate business.
Not only did Trump’s condemnation pale in comparison to those from lawmakers on both sides of the aisle, celebrities and even the maker of the tiki torches used at the rally, but it also came after he blamed “many sides” for the violent protest.
Throughout his campaign and after his election, HuffPost kept running lists of examples of Trump’s racism dating as far back as the 1970s. We’ll continue to document those incidents here as they happen.
Since winning the election, Trump has picked top advisers and cabinet officials whose careers are checkered by accusations of racially biased behavior.
Steve Bannon, Trump’s chief strategist and senior counselor, was executive chairman of Breitbart, a news site that Bannon dubbed the “home of the alt-right” ― a euphemism that describes a loose coalition of white supremacists and aligned groups. Under Bannon’s leadership, Breitbart increased its accommodation of openly racist and anti-Semitic writing, capitalizing on the rise of white nationalism prompted by Trump’s campaign.
Retired Lt. Gen. Mike Flynn ― who worked as Trump’s national security adviser until resigning in February amid revelations that he discussed U.S. sanctions against Russia with that country’s ambassador ― has drawn scrutiny for anti-Muslim comments he has made over the years. In February, Flynn tweeted that “fear of Muslims is rational.” Over the summer, he said that there is a “diseased component inside the Islamic world” that is like a “cancer.” Flynn has defended Trump’s past proposal of banning Muslim immigration and suggested he would be open to reviving torture techniques like waterboarding.
In addition, Trump has nominated Sen. Jeff Sessions (R-Ala.) to be attorney general of the United States. The Senate refused to confirm Sessions as a federal judge in 1986 amid accusations that he’d made racially insensitive comments, including that the only reason he hadn’t joined the Ku Klux Klan was because members of the extremist group smoked marijuana. Civil rights groups condemned Trump’s nomination of Sessions, while leading white nationalists celebrated it.
And Steve Mnuchin, who Trump tapped to serve as Treasury secretary, faces allegations of profiting from racial discrimination. As a hedge fund manager, Mnuchin purchased a troubled mortgage bank, sped up its foreclosure rate and sold it for a killing several years later. Along the way, Mnuchin’s bank came under fire from housing rights groups for racist practices like lending to very few people of color and maintaining foreclosed-upon properties in neighborhoods that were predominantly black and brown less than in white neighborhoods.
While the hate speech and racist violence emboldened by his campaign only escalated after his win, Trump downplayed the incidents and half-heartedly denounced them.
There were nearly 900 hate incidents across the U.S. in the 10 days following the election, a report released last month by the Southern Poverty Law Center found. Those attacks include vandals drawing swastikas on a synagogue, schools, cars and driveways; an assailant beating a gay man while saying the “president says we can kill all you faggots now”; and children telling their black classmates to sit in the back of the school bus.
In nearly 40 percent of those incidents, the SPLC found, people explicitly invoked the president-elect’s name or his campaign slogans.
The Council on American-Islamic Relations and the Anti-Defamation League have also tracked significant growth in racist and bigoted attacks.
“We’ve seen a great deal of really troubling stuff in the last week, a spike in harassment, a spike in vandalism, physical assaults. Something is happening that was not happening before,” ADL national director Jonathan Greenblatt told The New Yorker.
Despite those findings, Trump insisted on CBS’ “60 Minutes” the Sunday after his election that there had only been “a very small amount” of racist incidents.
“I am so saddened to hear that,” Trump said when asked about the racist incidents. “And I say, ‘Stop it.’ If it helps, I will say this, and I will say right to the camera: ‘Stop it.’”
He also accused the media of overstating the attacks.
“I think it’s built up by the press because, frankly, they’ll take every single little incident that they can find in this country, which could’ve been there before ― if I weren’t even around doing this ― and they’ll make it into an event, because that’s the way the press is,” he said.
Trump’s denouncement of hate-fueled violence was relatively mild, especially compared to the zeal with which he routinely attacks other targets ― like, say, “Saturday Night Live,” or the cast of “Hamilton,” who addressed Vice president-elect Mike Pence at a recent performance in New York that Pence attended.
“[Trump] hits the news media when he thinks there’s a story that’s unfair, he tweets when he is outraged about something in the media,” CNN host Wolf Blitzer said last month, after Trump criticized the cast of “Hamilton” for singling out Pence, whom the audience also booed. “But he doesn’t seem to go out of the way to express his outrage over people hailing him with Nazi salutes.”
And on and on with more racist actions for many years from the Orange One.
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/entry/tru ... mg00000009
