The Declaration says that we are all created equal, endowed with unalienable rights, including life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. The words are connected. Equality means that nobody can judge better than you whether you are happy. “As judges of our own happiness,” writes philosopher Danielle Allen, “we are all equals.”[1] Equality also means that nobody is good enough to rule others without their consent. In the last letter that he penned before his death in 1826. Jefferson wrote of “the palpable truth, that the mass of mankind has not been born with saddles on their backs, nor a favored few booted and spurred, ready to ride them legitimately, by the grace of god.”[2] Jefferson’s ideal of equality was the touchstone of Lincoln’s thought. To those who said that whites should rule because they were more intelligent, Lincoln replied: “By this rule, you are to be slave to the first man you meet, with an intellect superior to your own. But, say you, it is a question of interest; and, if you can make it your interest, you have the right to enslave another. Very well. And if he can make it his interest, he has the right to enslave you.”[3] In a debate with Stephen A. Douglas, he said of the black man: “in the right to eat the bread without the leave of anybody else which his own hand earns, he is my equal and the equal of Judge Douglas, and the equal of every other man.”[4]
Lincoln spoke those words less than three years before the Civil War. A persistent myth asserts that the war was about such things as tariffs. The Russians have helped promote this corrosive falsehood, as a footnote in the Mueller report confirms: “For example, one IRA account tweeted, ‘To those people, who hate the Confederate flag. Did you know that the flag and the war wasn’t about slavery, it was all about money.’ The tweet received over 40,000 responses. @Jenn_Abrams 4/24/17 (2:37 p.m.) Tweet.”[5] Contrary to the Russian propaganda, the Civil War was indeed about slavery. Alexander Stephens, the vice president of the Confederacy, freely admitted that the ideas of the Founding “rested upon the assumption of the equality of races.” He said that the assumption was wrong. “Our new government is founded upon exactly the opposite idea; its foundations are laid, its corner-stone rests, upon the great truth that the negro is not equal to the white man; that slavery subordination to the superior race is his natural and normal condition.”[6] That is what Robert E. Lee and other Confederates were fighting for. Fortunately, they lost.
During the 20th century, another challenge to the Founding arose in the form of the eugenics movement, which was more potent than we care to remember. Its followers preached that genes fated some people to be successful and others to be weak, stupid, or immoral. In other words, they embraced the “boots and saddles” philosophy that Jefferson had denounced. The movement aimed to improve the population’s genetic makeup by breeding “superior” groups and discouraging the reproduction of their “inferiors.” One popular textbook described multigenerational families full of lowlifes. “Hundreds of families such as those described above exist today, spreading disease, immorality, and crime to all parts of this country. . . . If such people were lower animals; we would probably kill them off to prevent them from spreading.”[7] These ideas had a racist tone. The textbook said: “These are the Ethiopian or negro type, originating in Africa; the Malay or brown race, from the islands of the Pacific; the American Indian; the Mongolian or yellow race, including the natives of China, Japan, and the Eskimos; and finally, the highest type of all, the Caucasians, represented by the civilized white inhabitants of Europe and America.”[8] Eugenic ideology left an imprint on public policy, providing a rationale for sterilizing people with disabilities and severely restricting immigration.
Eugenics started to fall out of favor as we confronted the Nazis in World War II. Various fringe groups clung to such ideas, however, and today’s alt-right white supremacists are the most recent example. Jared Taylor, the editor of a white supremacist online magazine, once wrote that “there is no evidence, either in America or abroad, in the present or in the past, that suggests blacks are as intelligent as other races. All of the evidence points to a significant and durable inequality.”[9] Alt-right leader Richard Spencer told Dinesh D’Souza: “The white race is expansive whether in terms of conquering, in terms of exploration of the seas or space, or scholarship and analysis of science. We possess something that’s peculiar to us, and it makes us special.” D’Souza asked if that “something” was genetic. “It is,” Spencer replied. “No question. Everything is in the genes.”[10]
The white supremacists move from genetics to a flat denial of the principles of the Declaration. Leaders of the alt-right have said that “nothing is less self-evident to us than the notion that all men are created equal” and that no phrase in history “has done more harm.”[11] With an approving citation of Alexander Stephens, Spencer said: “We hold these truths to be self-evident: that all men are created unequal.”[12]
Leading white supremacists had warm words for Trump in the 2016 campaign. When the press asked him if he accepted such endorsements, he sometimes muttered grudging disavowals, and at other times, he pleaded ignorance about his racist rooters. These reactions did not seem to bother them. “I love it,” David Duke told Lisa Mascaro of the Los Angeles Times. “The fact that Donald Trump’s doing so well, it proves that I’m winning. I am winning.” Richard Spencer added: “Before Trump, our identity ideas, national ideas, they had no place to go.”[13]
It is no wonder why so many white supremacists see Trump as a kindred spirit. He has repeatedly repudiated our country’s Founding principle.
In 1999, he told Maureen Dowd: “But a lot of things play well in words—like ‘All men are created equal’—that sounds magnificent and beautiful, but that doesn't necessarily make them so.”[14]
In 2004, he told Wolf Blitzer: “But the phrase that ‘all men are created equal’ is a wonderful phrase, but unfortunately it doesn’t work that way. All men are not created equal. Some are born with a genius and some are born without. Now, you need that. If you don’t have that, you can forget it.”[15]
In a 2006 video, he said: “You know they come with this statement ‘all men are created equal.’ Well, it sounds beautiful, and it was written by some very wonderful people and brilliant people, but it’s not true because all people and all men [laughter] aren’t created [equal] . . . you have to be born and blessed with something up here [pointing to his head]. On the assumption you are, you can become very rich.”[16]
In a 2009 interview, he told Deborah Solomon: “They say all men are created equal. It’s not true. Some people are born very smart, some people are born not so smart.”[17]
In an unpublished portion of the last interview, Solomon said that the phrase meant that people are entitled to equal rights under law. Trump acknowledged the point but did not say that he agreed with it. Instead, he complained: “The phrase is used often so much and it’s a very confusing phrase to a lot of people.”[18] His apologists might contend that he was merely talking about the diversity of abilities and was not really suggesting that people are unequal. Yes, he was suggesting just that. Out of all of the phrases in the Founding documents, “all men are created equal” was the only one that he kept repeating, and kept denying.
In recent years, his presidential speechwriters have gamely tried to get him right with America by sticking the word equal into some of his prepared texts. But their effort is like sprinkling cinnamon on arsenic: his attitude is a matter of record, and some new pro forma statements will not make the old, candid ones go away.
In Trump’s mind, where does the inequality come from? Like the white supremacists, he sees himself as an übermensch, and credits genes for his superiority. “Well, I think I was born with a drive for success,” he told CNN’s Becky Anderson. “I had a father who was successful. He was a builder in Brooklyn and Queens. And he was successful. And, you know, I have a certain gene. I’m a gene believer. Hey, when you connect two racehorses, you usually end up with a fast horse. And I really was—you know, I had a—a good gene pool from the standpoint of that.”[19] Five years later, he told a rally in Mobile, Alabama: “Do we believe in the gene thing? I mean, I do. Right? You know, I do. Like they used to say, Secretariat doesn’t produce slow horses.”[20] A few months after that speech, he tweeted: “I consider my health, stamina and strength one of my greatest assets. The world has watched me for many years and can so testify—great genes!”[21] Trump has often suggested that his genes had endowed him with a vast array of gifts. “I have a natural ability for land,” he boasted to biographer Michael D’Antonio.[22] He told reporters for the Associated Press, “I have a natural instinct for science.”[23] A Trump spokesperson even credited “good genes” for his peculiar orange skin tone.[24]
It goes without saying that there is no such thing as a “success gene.” For complex activities, success depends on the interaction of the person and the setting. The most important thing that Fred Trump left to Donald was not a set of genes but a pile of money. It is not certain that Trump’s dishonesty and shamelessness stem from genetics, but it is clear that he had the good luck to come of age in an environment that rewarded such traits instead of disdaining them. If he had grown up with the same character but in different circumstances—say, as a milkman’s son in a small town—he would probably have ended up in poverty or prison.
Trump’s obsession with genetic superiority raises that question of whether he thinks that certain demographic groups are inferior, particularly that they are prone to sloth and crime. The evidence indicates that he believes such things, or at least encourages others to believe them.
Recall from the introductory chapter that he first made the front page of the New York Times by blatantly discriminating against African American renters. He did not become more enlightened when he moved into the gambling business. “When Donald and Ivana came to the casino, the bosses would order all the black people off the floor,” former casino employee Kip Brown told The New Yorker. “It was the eighties, I was a teenager, but I remember it: they put us all in the back.”[25] The New Jersey Casino Control Commission hit Trump Plaza with a $200,000 fine for keeping black employees away from a racist, mob-connected high roller.[26] In a review of the penalty, an appeals panel said, “In our view, the transcript fairly reeks of Trump Plaza’s guilt.”[27] Casino executive John O’Donnell recalls bigoted remarks. At one of his casinos, Trump complained about an influx of African American patrons: “It’s looking a little dark in here.”[28] He disparaged an African American manager: “And isn’t it funny, I’ve got black accountants at Trump Castle and Trump Plaza. Black guys counting my money! I hate it. The only kind of people I want counting my money are short guys that wear yarmulkes every day.” He continued, directly referring to his belief in genetic destiny: “I think the guy is lazy, and it’s probably not his fault because laziness is a trait in blacks. It really is. I believe that. It’s not anything they can control.”[29] (Trump tried to belittle O’Donnell as a disgruntled former employee, but admitted, “The stuff O’Donnell wrote about me is probably true.”)[30]
Trump’s public remarks were scarcely more guarded. In 1989, a young white woman suffered a brutal assault and rape while jogging in New York’s Central Park. After a twelve-day coma stemming from a fractured skull and massive blood loss, she had no memory of the attack. Police arrested five suspects, four African Americans and one Hispanic, using trickery and coercion to obtain confessions. The oldest was just 16 years old. A racial frenzy ensued, with the city’s tabloids hyping the idea of “wilding”—random, savage attacks by “wolf packs” of black and brown young men. Trump added to the hysteria. “Mayor Koch has stated that hate and rancor should be removed from our hearts,” he said in a full-page newspaper ad. “I do not think so. I want to hate these muggers and murderers.”[31] In an interview with Larry King, he pressed the theme: “Of course I hate these people and let’s all hate these people because maybe hate is what we need if we’re gonna get something done.” He denied that he was “pre-judging” the suspects, but merely saying that they should get the death penalty if the victim died and they were found guilty.[32]
Of course, Trump would claim that “these people” specifically meant criminals, but many New Yorkers undoubtedly heard a broader racial message. The Bonfire of the Vanities, which captured the city’s zeitgeist in the late 1980s, revolved around an affluent white man who panicked after getting lost in a black neighborhood. White New Yorkers linked blacks to violent crime, and black New Yorkers were painfully aware of this attitude. “I knew that this famous person calling for us to die was very serious,” recalled Yusef Salaam, one of the five. “We were all afraid. Our families were afraid. Our loved ones were afraid. For us to walk around as if we had a target on our backs, that’s how things were.”[33]
In 1990, despite meager physical evidence, a jury convicted the teens. Attorney Michael Warren, who would later represent them, said that Trump’s advertisements played a part. “He poisoned the minds of many people who lived in New York and who, rightfully, had a natural affinity for the victim,” said Warren, adding that the jurors “had to be affected by the inflammatory rhetoric in the ads.”[34] The five youths would spend between 6 and 13 years behind bars. In 2002, a prisoner serving a life sentence for another crime confessed that he was the culprit. DNA testing confirmed his guilt and cleared the Central Park Five. They later received large settlements from New York City for their unjust imprisonment. Trump disregarded the facts and still insisted that they were guilty. “My opinion on the settlement of the Central Park Jogger case is that it’s a disgrace,” said a Trump-bylined op-ed in the New York Daily News. “The recipients must be laughing out loud at the stupidity of the city.”[35] Yusef Salaam wrote: “It’s further proof of Trump’s bias, racism and inability to admit that he’s wrong.”[36]
During the years when he was failing in the casino industry, he found a new target of color: Native Americans. Testifying before a congressional subcommittee about tribal casinos, he questioned the racial bona fides of the owners: “They don’t look like Indians to me, and they don’t look like Indians to Indians, and a lot of people are laughing at it, and you are telling how tough it is, how rough it is, to get approved. Well, you go up to Connecticut, and you look. Now, they don’t look like Indians to me.”[37] He said that they were not capable of keeping out organized crime—a statement that was richly ironic in light of his long-standing ties to the Mafia. In 2000, he resumed the effort to smear Native Americans. When New York State was considering expansion of tribal casinos, Trump started a stealth campaign to stir up racial fears. With Trump’s money, consultant Roger Stone cooked up a front group called “the New York Institute for Law and Safety,” which ran newspaper ads attacking the tribe that proposed to run new casinos. One ad said that “the Mohawk Indians have a long and documented history of criminal activity including drug dealing, cigarette and alcohol smuggling, illegal immigrant trafficking and violence.” Another asked: “Are these the new neighbors we want?” Signing off on the latter ad, Trump scrawled: “Roger, this could be good!”[38]
The rise of Barack Obama prompted another turn in Trump’s racial innuendo. As we have seen, he helped spread the myth that America’s first African American president was African, not American. And Trump was hooked on the idea that Obama was lazy. Dozens of times, he tweeted that Obama was playing golf instead of doing his job.[39] Consider this example from 2011: “@BarackObama played golf yesterday. Now he heads to a 10 day vacation in Martha’s Vineyard. Nice work ethic.”[40] Trump did not let go even after he became president. Giving visitors a tour of the White House, he pointed to a room and lied about his predecessor: “He just sat in here and watched basketball all day.”[41] Trump also suggested that Obama was not very intelligent. “I heard he was a terrible student, terrible. How does a bad student go to Columbia and then to Harvard?” Trump claimed in an interview with the Associated Press. “I’m thinking about it. I’m certainly looking into it. Let him show his records.”[42] Obama did his undergraduate work at Occidental and Columbia. Though it is true that he did not release his transcripts, he did graduate magna cum laude from Harvard Law School and was the first African American president of the Harvard Law Review.
Envy and psychological projection are at work here. Obama is younger, thinner, smarter, and more physically vigorous than his successor. Trump is notorious for his aversion to reading, his habit of binge-watching cable television during “executive time,” and his many days at his golf courses. Despite his professed pride in “being, like, really smart,” there is no record that he ever achieved any academic distinction. In fact, he ordered his fixer Michael Cohen to threaten administrators at his high school and colleges with civil and criminal charges if they disclosed his records.[43]
Trump has insulted the intelligence of many people, not just Barack Obama. But he does seem to reserve a specific contempt for African Americans. In the 2016 campaign, Cohen testified, “he told me that black people would never vote for him because they were too stupid.”[44] At a rally in Utica, New York, he attacked Representative Maxine Waters (D-CA): “Maxine Waters, the new face of the Democrat Party. Maxine Waters, she’s a real beauty. Maxine. Boy, oh boy, I watch her. Crazy Maxine. Low-IQ person, low IQ, and this is really what is steering, to a certain extent, the Democrats. I mean, she gets up and she wants people to be violent.”[45] In an interview with CNN’s Don Lemon, basketball legend LeBron James made a negative comment about Trump. In his Twitter reply, Trump managed to deride two African American men at once: “Lebron James was just interviewed by the dumbest man on television, Don Lemon. He made Lebron look smart, which isn’t easy to do.”[46]
On Twitter during the presidential race, Trump returned to his 1989 theme of black crime, this time even more directly. In April 2015, after civil unrest in Baltimore, he retweeted a blunt message from an anonymous source: “@circuspony2: @realDonaldTrump Did you see all the whites that were robbed & assaulted during the riots, Mr President? #Trump2016.”[47] In November of that year, a day after his supporters beat up an African American protester at one of his rallies, he retweeted a blatantly racist image of a masked black man with a pistol, along with bogus statistics purporting to compare black and white murder rates.[48] The original image soon disappeared from Twitter, but The Little Green Footballs blog saved a screenshot and traced it back to a neo-Nazi.[49]
During the spring and summer of 2017, the neo-Nazis came to Charlottesville, Virginia. The city council had voted to remove a statue of Robert E. Lee from a local park. The decision provided an occasion for white supremacists to descend on the city. In May, Richard Spencer led a rally and torchlight parade, where attendees chanted: “You will not replace us,” “Russia is our friend,” and the Nazi slogan “Blood and soil.”[50] In July, a small group of Klansmen held another rally. They were protesting “the ongoing cultural genocide . . . of white Americans,” according to one Klan member. “They’re trying to erase us out of the history books.”[51] The white supremacists planned a bigger rally for August. The rally’s organizer acknowledged that the Lee statue was merely a symbol of an “existential crisis” facing his kind: “White people are rapidly becoming a minority in the U.S. and Europe,” he said in an interview with Pro Publica. “If we’re not able to advocate for ourselves we may go extinct.”[52] On the evening of August 11, the event started with another torchlight parade. Among the slogans the marchers chanted was: “Jews will not replace us!” The next morning, white supremacists and counter-protesters started gathering. “We are determined to take our country back,” David Duke said in a conversation on the sidelines. “We are going to fulfill the promise of Donald Trump. That’s what we believe in. That’s why we voted for Donald Trump, because he said he’s going to take our country back.”[53] Before the rally could begin, however, fights broke out, and the police ordered the crowd to disperse. A couple of hours later, one of the white rallygoers deliberately drove his car into a group of pedestrians, killing counter-protester Heather Heyer.
Speaking at his New Jersey golf club, Trump reacted: “We condemn in the strongest possible terms this egregious display of hatred, bigotry, and violence, on many sides. On many sides. It’s been going on for a long time in our country. Not Donald Trump, not Barack Obama. This has been going on for a long, long time.”[54] In response to criticism that he was vague, the White House issued a statement that his comment included white supremacist groups. The next day, he recited a similar statement from a teleprompter. At a press availability on the following day, he made his now-infamous remarks equating the white supremacists and the counter-protesters:
[Y]ou had some very bad people in that group, but you also had people that were very fine people, on both sides. . . . And you had people—and I’m not talking about the neo-Nazis and the White nationalists, because they should be condemned totally—but you had many people in that group other than neo-Nazis and White nationalists. . . . Now, in the other group also, you had some fine people. But you also had troublemakers, and you see them come with the black outfits and with the helmets and with the baseball bats. You had a lot of bad people in the other group.[55]
Trump’s “even-handed” approach pleased white supremacists. “Really proud of him,” Richard Spencer wrote in a text message. “He bucked the narrative of Alt-Right violence, and made a statement that is fair and down to earth. C’ville could have hosted a peaceful rally—just like our event in May—if the police and mayor had done their jobs. Charlottesville needed to police the streets and police the antifa, whose organizations are dedicated to violence.” Jared Taylor said: “It is gratifying that there is at least one political figure who recognizes that not everyone who wants to keep the Lee statue is a neo-Nazi or white supremacist, and that many of the counterdemonstrators were violent thugs.”[56] And David Duke tweeted: “Thank you President Trump for your honesty & courage to tell the truth about #Charlottesville & condemn the leftist terrorists in BLM/Antifa.”[57]
Senator Lindsey Graham of South Carolina condemned Trump for “suggesting there is moral equivalency between the white supremacist neo-Nazis and KKK members who attended the Charlottesville rally and people like Ms. Heyer. I, along with many others, do not endorse this moral equivalency. Many Republicans do not agree with and will fight back against the idea that the Party of Lincoln has a welcome mat out for the David Dukes of the world.”[58] Graham was wrong about the last part. Elected Republicans, cowering in the face of Republican primary voters, ended up acquiescing in Trump’s behavior. Graham himself became one of Trump’s most servile enablers.
Two years later, Richard Spencer looked back: “There is no question that Charlottesville wouldn’t have occurred without Trump. It really was because of his campaign and this new potential for a nationalist candidate who was resonating with the public in a very intense way. The alt-right found something in Trump. He changed the paradigm and made this kind of public presence of the alt-right possible.”[59] Trump had no regrets. In 2019, a reporter asked him if he still thought that there were many fine people on both sides. He said: “Oh, I’ve answered that question. And if you look at what I said, you will see that that question was answered perfectly. And I was talking about people that went because they felt very strongly about the monument to Robert E. Lee, a great general.”[60] Trump lied. The real purpose of the rally was not to defend a statue of Robert E. Lee but to desecrate the hometown of Thomas Jefferson.
Trump often disparages dark-skinned immigrants and foreigners. “When Mexico sends its people, they’re not sending their best,” he said at his 2015 announcement of candidacy. “They’re sending people that have lots of problems, and they’re bringing those problems with us. They’re bringing drugs, they’re bringing crime, they’re rapists, and some, I assume are good people, but I speak to border guards and they tell us what we’re getting.”[61] As the previous chapter explained, his attacks on immigrants are just factually wrong. Although some migrants do commit serious offenses, a recent study shows that growth in undocumented immigration does not raise local crime rates.[62] In addition to being deceitful, his ugly language reflects and reinforces ugly prejudices. Echoing old xenophobic themes, Trump depicts his rhetorical targets as dangerous, diseased, and dirty.
At a 2018 White House meeting, he said: “We have people coming into the country, or trying to come in—and we’re stopping a lot of them—but we’re taking people out of the country. You wouldn’t believe how bad these people are. These aren’t people. These are animals.”[63] When reporters questioned his language, he said that he was responding to a comment about the MS-13 gang and that he was referring only to its members. But one could read the plain language of his remarks as applying broadly to people entering the country illegally—just as his 1989 comments on “these people” sounded as if they went beyond the Central Park Five.
When he dwells on Hispanic crime, his horror stories cross the border between the merely lurid and the downright kinky. Consider just three examples from January 2019. At a press statement on a government shutdown, he said, “you’ll have traffickers having three and four women with tape on their mouths and tied up, sitting in the back of a van or a car, and they’ll drive that van or the car not through a port of entry, where we have very talented people that look for every little morsel of drugs.”[64] Two days later, he repeated the idea: “But it’s not just illegals. It’s criminals. It’s drugs. It’s the new phenomena that’s been age-old, been going on for thousands of years, but it’s never been worse than now because of the Internet. Human trafficking—where they grab women, put tape over their mouth, come through our border, and sell them.”[65] And a few days after that, he was still talking about Mexicans “taping them up, wrapping tape around their mouths so they can’t shout or scream, tying up their hands behind their back and even their legs and putting them in a backseat of a car or a van—three, four, five, six, seven at a time.”[66] Human trafficking is horrible, of course, but reporters could find no basis for the details in Trump’s tales, which bear a disturbing likeness to bondage fantasy.
Between the raping and taping that he describes with such strange enthusiasm, Trump depicts outsiders as a sexual threat—something that bigots have done since time out of mind. Meanwhile, he is also repeating the ancient canard that they are bearers of sickness. In a 1903 magazine cartoon, a fat, unkempt immigrant carried a box with a message: “One million immigrants came to the U.S. in twelve months.” Beside him stood a health inspector who held a syringe and a sign that warned, “He brings disease.”[67] In the same vein, Trump tweeted in 2014, “Our government now imports illegal immigrants and deadly diseases. Our leaders are inept.”[68] The next year, he retweeted a follower’s rhetorical question: “In addition to the criminals among the illegal aliens what about all the infectious diseases they brought to US.”[69] And in 2018, he tweeted that Democrats “want Open Borders for anyone to come in. This brings large scale crime and disease.”[70] There is no evidence for such a claim, except in the self-fulfilling sense that foul conditions in immigrant detention facilities often sicken the detainees, particularly children.
From 2014 to 2016, there was an outbreak of the Ebola virus in West Africa. Trump did all that he could to turn concern into hysteria. He warned that unless the United States canceled flights from West Africa, “the plague will start and spread inside our ‘borders.’”[71] Instead of halting travel, President Obama sent troops to Liberia to set up healthcare facilities and train medical workers. Obama’s decision saved thousands of lives in Liberia, and in the end, there were fewer than a dozen cases in the United States. Nevertheless, Trump tweeted: “Why are we sending thousands of ill-trained soldiers into Ebola infested areas of Africa! Bring the plague back to U.S.? Obama is so stupid.”[72]
The word infest here is telling because it summons up images of vermin. As if by reflex, Trump often uses it when the topic involves immigration or people of immigrant stock. Democrats, he tweeted, “don’t care about crime and want illegal immigrants, no matter how bad they may be, to pour into and infest our Country, like MS-13.”[73] He tweeted about California: “Soooo many Sanctuary areas want OUT of this ridiculous, crime infested & breeding concept.”[74] He criticized Elijah Cummings, a House Democrat from Baltimore who had questioned administration policies at the border. “As proven last week during a Congressional tour, the Border is clean, efficient & well run, just very crowded,” Trump tweeted. “Cumming District [sic] is a disgusting, rat and rodent infested mess.”[75] In the summer of 2019, he went after four progressive House Democrats, tweeting that they “originally came from countries whose governments are a complete and total catastrophe.”[76] He added: “Why don’t they go back and help fix the totally broken and crime infested places from which they came.”[77] Three of the four were born in the United States, and the fourth was a naturalized citizen who came to the United States as a child refugee from Somalia. But because they were women of color, Trump assumed that they were all foreign. By the way, the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission cites the phrase “Go back to where you came from” as an example of harassment based on national origin.[78]
Despite widespread criticism of his comments, Trump refused to apologize. Instead, his campaign issued a fundraising email singling out one of the four, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez of New York. Denouncing her proposal for direct popular election of the president, the email said “this is our country, not theirs.”[79]
Trump associates third-world countries with filth and squalor. In a June 2017 meeting on immigration, he complained that Haitian visitors “all have AIDS” and that once Nigerians had seen this country, they would never “go back to their huts.”[80] During a January 2018 meeting at the Oval Office, he was even more hostile to black and brown people. As Josh Dawsey reported at the Washington Post, Trump got annoyed when lawmakers said that the protection of newcomers from Haiti, El Salvador, and African countries should be part of an agreement on immigration. “Why are we having all these people from shithole countries come here?” He singled out one country: “Why do we need more Haitians? Take them out.”[81]
He said that he preferred to bring in people from places such as Norway. Of all the developed countries he could have mentioned, why did he pick that one? In the early decades of the 20th century, “Nordic” was a catch-all term for white ethnic purity.[82] White supremacists such as David Duke, Richard Spencer, and Andrew Anglin took his comments as an endorsement of their views. Said Anglin: “This is encouraging and refreshing, as it indicates Trump is more or less on the same page as us with regards to race and immigration.” The racist group Identity Evropa, issued a statement: “Although we might put it differently, Identity Evropa shares President Trump’s sensible view that immigrants coming from countries like Norway are preferable to those coming from countries like Haiti.”[83]
Perhaps the best-known example of Trump’s prejudice is his series of attacks on Judge Gonzalo P. Curiel, who presided over a federal civil suit against the fraudulent Trump University. In February 2016, Trump complained at an Arkansas rally about “a very hostile judge . . . who I believe happens to be Spanish, which is fine.” The next day, he told Chris Wallace of Fox News: “Now, he is Hispanic, I believe. He is a very hostile judge to me. I said it loud and clear.” In San Diego three months later, he called Judge Curiel “a hater of Donald Trump . . . who happens to be, we believe, Mexican.”[84] Video shows the crowd booing loudly at the mention of the judge’s name. When the remarks caused controversy, Trump told the New York Times: “I’m building the wall, I’m building the wall. I have a Mexican judge. He’s of Mexican heritage. He should have recused himself, not only for that, for other things.”[85] Judge Curiel was born, raised, and educated in Indiana. If he is a Mexican judge, then Trump is a German president.
At the time, some Republicans could still speak out against Trump’s bigotry. House Speaker Paul Ryan (R-WI) said: “Claiming a person can’t do their job because of their race is sort of like the textbook definition of a racist comment.”[86] Senator Lindsey Graham (R-SC) said on CNN: “I don’t think he’s racist but he’s playing the race card. And in the political process he’s putting the race card on the table. I think it’s very un-American for a political leader to question whether a person can judge based on his heritage.”[87] In remarks to the New York Times, Graham drove home the point: “This is the most un-American thing from a politician since Joe McCarthy.”[88]
Julius Krein, a conservative intellectual who had once supported Trump, wrote in the summer of 2017 that incidents such as his attack on Judge Curiel or his reluctance to disavow David Duke were not merely campaign gaffes. “It is now clear that we were deluding ourselves. Either Mr. Trump is genuinely sympathetic to the David Duke types, or he is so obtuse as to be utterly incapable of learning from his worst mistakes. Either way, he continues to prove his harshest critics right.”[89]
Trump judges people by external characteristics. His favorite adjective is “beautiful,” and his opinions about appearance weigh heavily in his personnel choices. He nominated White House physician Ronny Jackson to head the Department of Veterans Affairs even though he had scant administrative background and little experience with veterans’ issues. But in addition to making sycophantic comments about Trump’s health, Jackson looked the part in the president’s eyes. “He’s like central casting,” said Trump. “He became a Hollywood star. He’s going to leave and go make a movie.”[90] Conversely, Trump rejects qualified people because of their looks. He declined to reappoint Janet Yellen to chair the Federal Reserve because he reportedly deemed the distinguished economist to be too short for the job.[91] He turned down Senator Bob Corker (R-TN) for similar reasons and later mocked the five-foot-seven lawmaker as “Liddle Bob Corker.”[92] One wonders what he would have thought of five-foot-zero Milton Friedman or five-foot-four James Madison.
The obsession with looks also applies to his political foes. During the Republican primary campaign, he dismissed Carly Fiorina: “Look at that face. Would anybody vote for that? Can you imagine that, the face of our next president?”[93] In 2016, he made this odd criticism of Hillary Clinton: “I just don’t believe she has a presidential look, and you need a presidential look.”[94] He attacked the chair of the House Intelligence Committee as “Pencil Neck Adam Schiff.” He initially referred to the California Democrat as “Liddle Adam Schiff,” but perhaps an aide informed him that Schiff is five foot eleven.
His scorn for perceived imperfection is especially toxic in the case of disability. He has little use for people with physical disabilities and other limitations and will not go out of his way to help them, even when they are relatives. Trump and his siblings cut off their nephew’s medical coverage after he challenged the will of their father, Fred Trump. The nephew had an infant son with a severe neurological disorder causing seizures and brain damage. When a reporter for the New York Daily News asked whether terminating the insurance would seem cold-hearted, given the enormous cost of treating the baby’s disability, Trump was dismissive. “I can’t help that. It’s cold when someone sues my father. Had he come to see me, things could very possibly have been much different for them.”[95] The nephew and his wife sued Trump and reached a settlement. Their son now lives with cerebral palsy.
Barbara Res, who was vice president of construction at the Trump Organization, recalled Trump talking to an architect in a Trump Tower residential elevator. He asked the architect about raised dots next to the floor numbers. When the architect explained that they were Braille, Trump ordered the architect to get rid of them. The architect demurred, which triggered a Trump outburst. “Get rid of the [expletive] braille,” he said. “No blind people are going to live in Trump Tower. Just do it.”[96]
His intolerance for disabled people burst into public view when he mocked New York Times investigative reporter Serge Kovaleski for his recollection of a story about Muslims and the 9/11 attacks. Trump made fun of Kovaleski’s arthrogryposis, a condition that severely limits the use of his arms. “Now, the poor guy—you’ve got to see this guy, ‘Ah, I don't know what I said! I don’t remember!’” Trump said as he thrashed his arms.[97] Trump later denied that he was ridiculing Kovaleski’s disability, claiming that he did not even remember the reporter. Yet another lie. Kovaleski, who had covered Trump’s business career, told the New York Times: “Donald and I were on a first-name basis for years.”[98] Someone like Trump would never forget Kovaleski’s appearance, which is why he prefaced his mockery with the words “You’ve got to see this guy.” Columnist Ann Coulter made an absurd attempt to defend Trump, saying that he was not specifically deriding Kovaleski, but merely “doing a standard retard, waving his arms and sounding stupid.”[99]
The one bit of truth in Coulter’s excuse is that Trump uses the r-word as a term of derision. In September 2008, he tweeted about Fear, journalist Bob Woodward’s account of the first year of his administration. “The already discredited Woodward book, so many lies and phony sources, has me calling Jeff Sessions ‘mentally retarded’ and ‘a dumb southerner.’ I said NEITHER, never used those terms on anyone, including Jeff.”[100] In fact, audio recordings prove that he had used the r-word to insult people. In April 2004, he told shock jock Howard Stern: “But you know, I was criticized in one magazine, where the writer was retarded and said, ‘Donald Trump put up seven million dollars.’ I put up, this put up like, 45 times more money. And then, they criticize me for not putting up more money. I mean these guys are dopes.”[101] During a September appearance on the show, he started to use the word again but cut himself off: “I have a golf pro who’s mentally ret—I mean he’s like, really not a smart guy.”[102] And although backstage recordings from Celebrity Apprentice have not become public, three sources told The Daily Beast that he repeatedly used the term against Marlee Matlin, the Oscar-winning deaf actress who competed on the show.[103] New York Times journalist Maureen Dowd reported that he walked out on a prank interview with comic actor Sacha Baron Cohen: “I thought he was seriously retarded. It was a total con job. But my daughter, Ivanka, saw it and thought it was very cool.”[104] And in an otherwise favorable book about Trump’s public relations, Robert Slater quoted him: “Unless you’re retarded, who wants to answer questions all day? I would rather be reading the newspaper or bullshitting.”[105]
In 2017, the Trump White House issued a staff-written statement on Down Syndrome Awareness Month: “Sadly, there remain too many people—both in the United States and throughout the world—that still see Down syndrome as an excuse to ignore or discard human life.”[106] Antiabortion conservatives take such statements as a sign that Trump believes in the equal dignity of people with disabilities. Unscripted comments point in another direction. Trump had always been pro-choice until he needed evangelical support for his presidential campaign. He claimed that he switched sides because he knew a family that decided not to abort and that their child had become “a total superstar.” In an interview for The Daily Caller, Jamie Weinstein asked him if he would have made the change if the child had not been a superstar. If Trump sincerely opposed abortion and believed in human equality, he would have answered that the right to life belongs as much to people who struggle with disabilities as to physically perfect superstars. Here is what he said instead: “I’ve never thought of it. That’s an interesting question. I’ve never thought of it. Probably not, but I’ve never thought of it. I would say no, but in this case it was an easy one because he’s such an outstanding person.”[107]
Even when he feigns respect for people with disabilities, his true feelings slip out. Welcoming Olympic athletes to the White House, he said: “And what happened with the Paralympics was so incredible and so inspiring to me. And I watched—it’s a little tough to watch too much, but I watched as much as I could.”[108] Some said that Trump was merely referring to limits on his time, which was implausible in light of his appetite for television. Lawyer David Cross, who was born without a left hand, wrote that the remark was offensive. “Many people find it ‘tough to watch’ those of us with disabilities. . . . This physical shunning provides a regular reminder that we are unlike those around us. And that hurts.”[109]
Trump’s disdain for the disabled extends to people who acquired their disabilities while serving our country. In 1991, he objected to disabled veterans peddling goods near his property, saying that they were “clogging and seriously downgrading the area.”[110] In 2004, he wrote Mayor Michael Bloomberg. He claimed that some of the vendors were merely pretending to be veterans, saying that one had said, “Mr. Trump, I am too smart to fight in a war.” But he also wanted to keep the real veterans away, too. “Whether they are veterans or not, they [the vendors] should not be allowed to sell on this most important and prestigious shopping street.” He asserted that they were making a mess, and then used a word that would gain a great deal of freight during the 2016 campaign: “I hope you can stop this very deplorable situation before it is too late.”[111]
According to the indictment of the Russians’ Internet Research Agency (IRA), a strategic goal of their influence campaign was “to sow discord in the U.S. political system.”[112] Conflict over equality offers a potent means to this end. After all, it was the ultimate cause of the Civil War. Although Mueller presented no direct evidence of conspiracy, Trump and the Russian trolls both sowed plenty of discord, with the latter often explicitly supporting the former. NBC obtained a Russian document saying that Trump’s election had “deepened conflicts in American society” and suggested a successful influence project would “undermine the country’s territorial integrity and military and economic potential.”[113] Even if they did not work together, they worked in parallel.
The Mueller team identified dozens of US rallies organized by the IRA. The earliest evidence of their effort was a “confederate rally” in November 2015.[114] The Russians also targeted social media ads at whites and racial minorities in order to pit them against one another. Reporters at USA Today analyzed 3,517 IRA Facebook ads released by the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence. More than half of them, accounting for 25 million ad impressions, directly mentioned race. The next two most common topics were crime and immigration.[115] After the Charlottesville incident, Russian Twitter trolls backed Trump with thousands of tweets such as “#aleex Uncovered Video DESTROYS Liberal Narrative Trump is a White Supremacist #alexx.”[116] The pro-Trump surge stopped abruptly after a few days, apparently because Twitter shut down many Russia-linked accounts.
Nevertheless, the Russian leaders must be pleased. A 2019 Pew survey found that 58 percent of Americans said race relations were bad, and 56 percent thought that Trump had made them worse. About two-thirds said that it had become more common for people to express racist views since Trump took office, and 45 percent said that such expressions had become more acceptable.[117]
There is a historical link to a mid-19th-century political movement that opposed immigration. Its members gained the nickname of “Know-Nothings” because of instructions to answer questions by claiming to know nothing about the group. The Know-Nothings spoke of newcomers much as Trump does today, claiming that they brought crime and disease. They referred to Irish Catholic immigrants as “St. Patrick’s vermin.” Their official name was “the American Party,” which was a cover for their un-American attitudes. One Illinois lawyer was not buying. In an 1855 letter to a friend, Abraham Lincoln wrote that “if the Know-Nothings took over, the Declaration of Independence would read: ‘All men are created equal, except negroes, and foreigners, and Catholics.’ When it comes to this I should prefer emigrating to some country where they make no pretense of loving liberty—to Russia, for instance, where despotism can be taken pure, and without the base alloy of hypocrisy.”[118]
Allen, Our Declaration, 188.
Thomas Jefferson, letter to Roger Weightman, June 24, 1826, https://www.loc.gov/exhibits/jefferson/214.html.
Abraham Lincoln, “Fragments on Slavery,” 1854, http://founding.com/founders-library/american-political-figures/abraham-lincoln/fragments-on-slavery.
Sixth Lincoln-Douglas Debate, Quincy, Illinois, October 13, 1858, https://www.nps.gov/liho/learn/historyculture/debate6.htm.
S Department of Justice, Special Counsel’s Office, Report on the Investigation, vol. I, p. 27, fn70.
Alexander H. Stephens, “The Cornerstone Speech,” March 21, 1861, https://teachingamericanhistory.org/library/document/cornerstone-speech.
George William Hunter, A Civic Biology (New York: American Book Company, 1914), 263.
Hunter, A Civic Biology, 196.
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Quoted in Thomas J. Main, The Rise of the Alt-Right (Washington, DC: Brookings Institution Press, 2018), 128.
Main, The Rise of the Alt-Right, 127.
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Donald Trump and Robert Kiyosaki, “Why We Want You to Be Rich,” 2006, https://youtu.be/hPOCSJ23bh0.
Deborah Solomon, “If He Builds It,” New York Times, March 25, 2009, https://www.nytimes.com/2009/03/29/magazine/29wwln-q4-t.html.
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John R. O’Connell with James Rutherford, Trumped! The Inside Story of the Real Donald Trump—His Cunning Rise and Spectacular Fall (New York: Crossroad Press, 2016 [1991]), 115.
Marcus Baram, “Donald Trump Was Once Sued by Justice Department for Not Renting to Blacks,” Huffington Post, April 29, 2011, https://www.huffpost.com/entry/donald-trump-blacks-lawsuit_n_855553.
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Andrew Kaczynski and Jon Sarlin, “Trump in 1989 Central Park Five Interview: ‘Maybe Hate Is What We Need,’” CNN, October 10, 2016, https://www.cnn.com/2016/10/07/politics/trump-larry-king-central-park-five/index.html.
Oliver Laughland, “Donald Trump and the Central Park Five: The Racially Charged Rise of a Demagogue,” The Guardian, February 17, 2016, https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2016/feb/17/central-park-five-donald-trump-jogger-rape-case-new-york.
Laughland, “Donald Trump and the Central Park Five.”
Donald Trump, “Donald Trump: Central Park Five Settlement Is a ‘Disgrace,’” New York Daily News, June 21, 2014, https://www.nydailynews.com/new-york/nyc-crime/donald-trump-central-park-settlement-disgrace-article-1.1838467.
Yusef Salaam, “I’m One of the Central Park Five. Donald Trump Won’t Leave Me Alone,” Washington Post, October 12, 2016, https://www.washingtonpost.com/posteverything/wp/2016/10/12/im-one-of-the-central-park-five-donald-trump-wont-leave-me-alone.
US Congress, House, Committee on Natural Resources, Subcommittee on Native American Affairs, Implementation of the Indian Gaming Regulatory Act, 103d Congress, 1st sess., October 5, 1993, 242.
“Trump Personally Approved Ads Slamming Indian Tribe: ‘This Could Be Good!’” Los Angeles Times, June 29, 2016, http://documents.latimes.com/trump-personally-approved-ads-slamming-indian-tribe-could-be-good.
Jason Kirk, “The 27 Times Donald Trump Tweeted about Barack Obama Playing Golf Too Much,” SBNation, February 3, 2018, https://www.sbnation.com/golf/2017/3/27/15073086/donald-trump-tweets-barack-obama-golf.
Donald J. Trump, Twitter post, August 15, 2011, https://twitter.com/realDonaldTrump/status/103158206498476032.
Josh Dawsey, “‘Want to See the Lincoln Bedroom?’: Trump Relishes Role as White House Tour Guide,” Washington Post, January 28, 2019, https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/want-to-see-the-lincoln-bedroom-trump-relishes-role-as-white-house-tour-guide/2019/01/28/fe1254b0-20f7-11e9-bda9-d6efefc397e8_story.html.
Bethy Fouhy, “Trump: Obama a ‘Terrible Student’ Not Good Enough for Harvard,” Associated Press, April 25, 2011, https://www.nbcnewyork.com/news/local/Trump-Obama-Wasnt-Good-Enough-to-Get-into-Ivy-Schools-120657869.html.
House Oversight, Hearing with Michael Cohen, 14.
House Oversight, Hearing with Michael Cohen, 13.
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Donald J. Trump, Twitter post, April 30, 2015, https://twitter.com/realDonaldTrump/status/593752475263442944.
Donald J. Trump, Twitter post, November 22, 2015, https://twitter.com/realDonaldTrump/status/668520614697820160.
Charles Johnson, “We Found Where Donald Trump’s ‘Black Crimes’ Graphic Came From,” Little Green Footballs, November 22, 2015, http://littlegreenfootballs.com/article/45291_We_Found_Where_Donald_Trumps_Black_Crimes_Graphic_Came_From.
“Torch-Wielding Protesters Gather at Lee Park,” The Daily Progress, May 13, 2017, https://www.dailyprogress.com/news/local/torch-wielding-protesters-gather-at-lee-park/article_201dc390-384d-11e7-bf16-fb43de0f5d38.html.
Sarah Toy, “KKK Rally in Charlottesville Met with Throng of Protesters,” USA Today, July 8, 2017, https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/nation-now/2017/07/08/kkk-holds-rally-virginia-and-met-protesters/462146001.
A. C. Thompson, “A Few Things Got Left out of The Daily Caller’s Report on Confederate Monument Rally,” Pro Publica, May 31, 2017, https://www.propublica.org/article/things-got-left-out-of-the-daily-callers-report-confederate-monument-rally.
Libby Nelson, “‘Why We Voted for Donald Trump’: David Duke Explains the White Supremacist Charlottesville Protests,” Vox, August 12, 2017, https://www.vox.com/2017/8/12/16138358/charlottesville-protests-david-duke-kkk.
Donald J. Trump, Remarks on Signing the VA Choice and Quality Employment Act of 2017 in Bedminster, New Jersey, August 12, 2017, online by Gerhard Peters and John T. Woolley, The American Presidency Project, https://www.presidency.ucsb.edu/documents/remarks-signing-the-va-choice-and-quality-employment-act-2017-bedminster-new-jersey.
Donald J. Trump, Remarks on Infrastructure and an Exchange with Reporters in New York City, August 15, 2017, online by Gerhard Peters and John T. Woolley, The American Presidency Project, https://www.presidency.ucsb.edu/documents/remarks-infrastructure-and-exchange-with-reporters-new-york-city.
Rosie Gray, “‘Really Proud of Him’: Alt-Right Leaders Praise Trump’s Comments,” The Atlantic, August 15, 2017, https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2017/08/really-proud-of-him-richard-spencer-and-alt-right-leaders-praise-trumps-comments/537039.
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Lindsey Graham, “Graham Statement on Charlottesville,” August 16, 2017, https://www.lgraham.senate.gov/public/index.cfm/2017/8/graham-statement-on-charlottesville.
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Donald J. Trump, Twitter post, July 5, 2015, https://twitter.com/realdonaldtrump/status/618229195181826049.
Donald J. Trump, Twitter post, December 11, 2018, https://twitter.com/realDonaldTrump/status/1072464107784323072.
Donald J. Trump, Twitter post, August 2, 2014, https://twitter.com/realDonaldTrump/status/495531002505494528.
Donald J. Trump, Twitter post, September 19, 2014, https://twitter.com/realdonaldtrump/status/513141602064543744.
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Josh Dawsey, “Trump Derides Protections for Immigrants from ‘Shithole’ Countries,” Washington Post, January 12, 2018, https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/trump-attacks-protections-for-immigrants-from-shithole-countries-in-oval-office-meeting/2018/01/11/bfc0725c-f711-11e7-91af-31ac729add94_story.html.
Sarah Churchwell, Behold America: The Entangled History of “America First” and “The American Dream” (New York: Basic Books, 2018), 54–55.
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Heather Caygle, “Ryan: Trump’s Comments ‘Textbook Definition’ of Racism,” Politico, June 7, 2016, https://www.politico.com/story/2016/06/paul-ryan-trump-judge-223991.
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Patrick Healy, Maggie Haberman, and Jonathan Martin, “Democrats Jump on Allies of Donald Trump in Judge Dispute,” New York Times, June 6, 2016, https://www.nytimes.com/2016/06/07/us/politics/democrats-trump-presidential-race.html.
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“Trump Fires V.A. Secretary Shulkin, Nominates White House Physician,” CNN Newsroom, March 29, 2018, http://www.cnn.com/TRANSCRIPTS/1803/29/cnr.06.html.
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Meghan Keneally, “Donald Trump Offends Some with Comment That Clinton Lacks ‘Presidential Look,’” ABC News, September 6, 2016, https://abcnews.go.com/Politics/donald-trump-offends-comment-clinton-lacks-presidential/story?id=41891411.
Heidi Evans, “Inside Trumps’ Bitter Battle: Nephew’s Ailing Baby Caught in the Middle.” New York Daily News, December 19, 2000, https://www.nydailynews.com/archives/news/trumps-bitter-battle-nephew-ailing-baby-caught-middle-article-1.888562.
Barbara Res, “Trump and His Flunkies: Why Aren’t Staffers Standing Up to Him?” New York Daily News, September 12, 2018, https://www.nydailynews.com/opinion/ny-oped-trump-and-his-flunkies-20180911-story.html.
Jose A. DelReal, “Trump Draws Scornful Rebuke for Mocking Reporter with Disability,” Washington Post, November 26, 2015, https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/post-politics/wp/2015/11/25/trump-blasted-by-new-york-times-after-mocking-reporter-with-disability.
Maggie Haberman, “Donald Trump Says His Mocking of New York Times Reporter Was Misread,” New York Times, November 26, 2015, https://www.nytimes.com/2015/11/27/us/politics/donald-trump-says-his-mocking-of-new-york-times-reporter-was-misread.html.
Ken Meyer, “Coulter Says Trump Was ‘Doing a Standard Retard,’ Not Mocking Disabled Reporter,” Mediaite, September 1, 2016, https://www.mediaite.com/online/coulter-says-trump-was-doing-a-standard-retard-not-mocking-disabled-reporter.
Donald J. Trump, Twitter post, September 4, 2018, https://twitter.com/realDonaldTrump/status/1037173907625832448
Interview: Donald Trump on The Howard Stern Show, April 16, 2004, https://factba.se/transcript/donald-trump-interview-howard-stern-show-april-16-2004.
Interview: Donald Trump on The Howard Stern Show, September 23, 2004, https://factba.se/transcript/donald-trump-interview-howard-stern-show-september-23-2004.
Gideon Resnick and Asawin Suebsaeng, “Donald Trump Called Deaf Apprentice Marlee Matlin ‘Retarded,’ Three Staffers Say,” The Daily Beast, October 13, 2016, https://www.thedailybeast.com/donald-trump-called-deaf-apprentice-marlee-matlin-retarded-three-staffers-say.
Maureen Dowd, “Is You Wicked,” New York Times, May 3, 2003, https://www.nytimes.com/2003/05/07/opinion/is-you-wicked.html.
Robert Slater, No Such Thing as Over-Exposure: Inside the Life and Celebrity of Donald Trump (Upper Saddle River, NJ: Pearson Prentice Hall, 2005), 197.
Statement from President Donald J. Trump on Down Syndrome Awareness Month, October 1, 2017, https://www.whitehouse.gov/briefings-statements/statement-president-donald-j-trump-syndrome-awareness-month.
Jamie Weinstein, “Trump on Flag Burning, The ‘Superstar’ Who Made Him Pro-Life, and Whether He’d Live in the White House,” Daily Caller, September 3, 2015, https://dailycaller.com/2015/09/03/trump-on-flag-burning-the-superstar-who-made-him-pro-life-and-whether-hed-live-in-the-white-house/.
Remarks by President Trump Welcoming the U.S. Olympic Team, April 27, 2018, https://www.whitehouse.gov/briefings-statements/remarks-president-trump-welcoming-u-s-olympic-team/.
David Cross, “Take It from a Lawyer with a Disability: Trump’s Paralympics Comments Were Offensive,” USA Today, May 11, 2018, https://www.usatoday.com/story/opinion/2018/05/11/donald-trump-paralympics-disabled-tough-watch-column/599142002.
Celeste Katz, “Donald Trump Tried to Limit Street Vendors on Fifth Ave., Including Those Who Were Veterans,” New York Daily News, August 3, 2015, https://www.nydailynews.com/news/politics/exclusive-donald-trump-push-street-vendors-article-1.2312519.
William J. Gorta, “Trump to Mayor: Boot Fifth Ave. Peddlers,” New York Post, June 18, 2004, https://nypost.com/2004/06/18/trump-to-mayor-boot-fifth-ave-peddlers.
United States of America v. Internet Research Agency LLC [and 15 others], defendants: case 1:18-cr-00032-DLF, February 18, 2018, https://permanent.access.gpo.gov/gpo89499/file1035477download.pdf.
Richard Engel, Kate Benyon-Tinker, and Kennett Werner, “Russian Documents Reveal Desire to Sow Racial Discord—and Violence—in the U.S.,” NBC News, May 20, 2019, https://www.nbcnews.com/news/world/russian-documents-reveal-desire-sow-racial-discord-violence-u-s-n1008051.
US Department of Justice, Special Counsel’s Office, Report on the Investigation, vol. I, p. 29, fn85.
Nick Penzenstadler, Brad Heath, and Jessica Guynn, “We Read Every One of the 3,517 Facebook Ads Bought by Russians. Here’s What We Found,” USA Today, May 11, 2018, https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/2018/05/11/what-we-found-facebook-ads-russians-accused-election-meddling/602319002.
Peter Aldhous, “Russian Trolls Swarmed the Charlottesville March—Then Twitter Cracked Down,” Buzzfeed, August 11, 2018, https://www.buzzfeednews.com/article/peteraldhous/russia-twitter-trolls-charlottesville.
Juliana Menasce Horowitz, Anna Brown, and Kiana Cox, “Race in America 2019,” Pew Research Center, April 9, 2019, https://www.pewsocialtrends.org/2019/04/09/race-in-america-2019/.
Abraham Lincoln, letter to Joshua Speed, August 24, 1855, http://www.abrahamlincolnonline.org/lincoln/speeches/speed.htm