Donald Trump’s Deep White Supremacist Roots: From His Father’s Klan Membership to the Klan Supporting His Presidency
In 1927, Donald Trump’s father was one of seven men arrested at a Ku Klux Klan rally that turned violent. Although some people have speculated that Fred Trump could have been an innocent bystander swept up in a chaotic moment, articles from the time make it clear that the seven men arrested were wearing Klan robes. Fred held onto his White supremacist ideology as the years moved on: as a housing developer, he enforced strict segregation. One of his tenants was the folk music icon Woody Guthrie, who wrote a song titled “Old Man Trump”:
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.
Fred Trump passed his beliefs, and his business, on to his son Donald. In 1973, the US Department of Justice filed a lawsuit accusing the Trump Organization of racial discrimination. Donald Trump refused to admit any wrongdoing but eventually settled the case, promising to open his apartments to people of color. However, in 1978 the Department of Justice again charged the Trump organization with discrimination. According to investigations, Trump’s rental applications were secretly marked with the applicant’s race, and doormen were coached to discourage Black people from renting. In 1983, the New York State Division of Housing and Community Renewal investigated some of Trump’s properties and found they were 95 percent White.
When Trump got into the casino business in the 1980s, the managers would order Black workers into the back rooms when Trump visited so he wouldn’t have to see them. Trump reportedly couldn’t stand having Black accountants because, quote: “laziness is a trait in blacks. It really is, I believe that. It’s not anything they can control.” On the other hand, Trump stated that Jews were good at counting money. In 1992 The Trump Plaza Hotel and Casino had to pay a $200,000 fine because it transferred Black (and female) dealers off of tables to accommodate a big-time (and mob connected) gambler’s prejudices. In order to prevent competition from Native American casinos, Trump ran an ad campaign portraying the Mohawk peoples as drug addicted criminals.
During the 1989 Central Park 5 case, Trump called for the death penalty for five Black and Latino teenagers (aged 14 to 16) who were falsely accused of rape. Trump was so invested in their death that he purchased full-page ads in the New York Times urging New York to reinstate the death penalty. The Central Park 5 suffered horribly in prison, but DNA tests combined with the confession of a known murderer and rapist later proved their innocence. However Donald Trump, even as President, has not only refused to apologize, but even to admit their innocence. When asked about this in 2019 he stated: “You have people on both sides of that.”
Skipping ahead to the beginning of Trump’s political ascendance, through his promotion of the conspiracy theory that America’s first Black president was not born in the United States. This conspiracy began in 2008, and to settle the matter, Obama’s original birth certificate was examined and judged valid, and Obama publicly released a digital scan of his short-form birth certificate. The Hawaii State Department of Health keeps publicly accessible files of all children born in Hawaii, and those files included records of Obama’s birth in Honolulu. A local paper had also announced Obama’s birth in publicly available records. However, when Donald Trump announced that he was considering a run against President Obama in 2011, he did so by whipping up a renewed frenzy about Obama’s birthplace. This prompted Obama to release his long-form birth certificate, but for years afterward Trump continued to promote the birther conspiracy theory. Trump was unconcerned with facts: he was promoting a message that a Black man whose middle name was “Hussein” was not a real American. When Kamala Harris became the Vice Presidential pick, Trump questioned her citizenship as well.
Trump launched his campaign for president in June of 2015 by whipping up fear that Mexican immigrants were rapists and murders. As the official Republican candidate, Trump called for a “total and complete shutdown of Muslims entering the United States,” and even sought to exclude Muslim citizens travelling abroad from reentering the U.S. Meanwhile, Trump endorsed allowing in more immigrants from Europe, who were “tremendous” and “hard-working.” Such comments led Senator Jeff Sessions to become a staunch Trump supporter and advisor early in Trump’s campaign. Sessions is on record praising the 1924 immigration bill, which sought to restrict American immigration to White people. In prior decades, Sessions had condemned the NAACP and Martin Luther King’s SCLC as “un-American.” He had accused a White attorney who supported voting rights of being a “race traitor”, and had even joked that he was okay with the Ku Klux Klan but was worried that they smoked pot. Coretta Scott King wrote a letter to Congress urging them to block the 1986 nomination of Jeff Sessions as a federal judge, saying that allowing him to join the federal bench would “irreparably damage the work of my husband.” Mrs. King continued: “The irony of Mr. Sessions’ nomination is that, if confirmed, he will be given a life tenure for doing with a federal prosecution what the local sheriffs accomplished twenty years ago with clubs and cattle prods.” Sessions did not win a seat as a federal judge, but as Alabama’s attorney general in the 1990s, he did indeed work feverishly to reverse the gains of the civil rights movement in that state. This is the man Donald Trump chose to be his attorney general.
Jeff Sessions brought with him his protégé and aide, Stephen Miller. Miller had worked closely with Richard Spencer while the two were at Duke University: Spencer went on to become a leading figure in the White nationalist movement and was the central leader of the Unite the Right rally in Charlottesville in 2017. Through Sessions, Miller soon became Trump’s leading advisor. Miller takes great lengths to keep his communications secret, but leaked emails from his time with Sessions reveal him exchanging White nationalist websites with Breitbart that promoted the idea of White genocide, or the idea that population increases and migrations of Black and Brown people were a threat to the “White race.” (This was, by the way, an idea that influenced the 1924 immigration bill Jeff Sessions was a fan of… a bill that Hitler literally praises in Mein Kampf.) Miller shared ideas of White genocide during a discussion of the importance of preventing Central American refugees who were fleeing a hurricane from entering the U.S. In another email he recommended that Breitbart write about the ultra-racist novel “Camp of the Saints,” a text revered by neo-Nazis in which Black and Brown people rape and murder White people and eat feces, whereas “heroic” White nationalist figures kill leftists who promote “race mixing” and support refugees. This man became the chief architect of Trump’s immigration policies… including the “Muslim ban,” the brutal policy of “family separation,” and Trump’s slashing of the number of refugees allowed into the U.S. from 110,000 to 18,000.
Jeff Sessions had supported Trump essentially from the start of his Presidential campaign in June of 2015, and officially endorsed Trump in February of 2016. During that same month, the former Grand Wizard of the Ku Klux Klan, David Duke, did as well. Duke urged his followers to get out and organize for Donald Trump, and warned them that not doing so was “treason to your heritage.” Duke continued: “…call Donald Trump’s headquarters, volunteer. They’re screaming for volunteers. Go in there, you’re gonna meet people who are going to have the same kind of mind-set that you have.” A few months later Duke told reporters that Trump’s candidacy had allowed his followers and others like them to finally come forward and openly discuss their beliefs. When Donald Trump was asked to publicly repudiate Duke’s endorsement, he responded: “I don’t know anything about David Duke, okay? I don’t know anything about what you’re even talking about with white supremacy or white supremacists.” When Trump was asked if he would condemn other White supremacist groups that supported him, Trump responded that he would need to do research into specific groups. Under increasing pressure, Trump finally did condemn David Duke, and blamed his previous unwillingness to do so on a “faulty ear piece” during an interview. This routine of refusing to condemn White supremacists, then begrudgingly doing so under pressure and creating a lame excuse, would soon become a familiar pattern for Trump.
Other hardcore White supremacist endorsements rolled in: From the neo-Nazi Daily Stormer, which contains special sections on “The Jewish Problem” and “Race War.” From the Ku Klux Klan newspaper The Crusader, which hails itself as “the premier voice of the white resistance.” From the internet’s first major forum of White supremacist hatred, Stormfront. From former Grand Dragon Don Black. From August Kreis III, the former Aryan Nations Minister of Information and Propaganda. From the White supremacist website VDARE. The list goes on and on. Rocky J. Suhayda, the leader of the American Nazi Party, wrote: “We have a wonderful OPPORTUNITY here folks, that may never come again . . . Donald Trump’s campaign statements, if nothing else, have SHOWN that ‘our views’ are NOT so ‘unpopular’ as the Political Correctness crowd have told everyone they are!”
Trump regularly retweeted the voices representing these movements. During the 2016 primaries, Trump turned his Twitter feed into perhaps the world’s leading source of White supremacist disinformation, full of supposed “statistics” and “real news” regarding crime, immigration, Muslims, Jews, the “fake media,” and so on. To give just a few examples: during this time Trump retweeted a graph claiming that 81 percent of White homicide victims were killed by Blacks (the FBI statistic is 15 percent: the vast majority of White homicide victims are killed by other White people.) To quote a New York Times article: Trump “retweeted messages from a user with the handle @WhiteGenocideTM, whose profile picture is of George Lincoln Rockwell, the founder of the American Nazi Party. A couple of days later, in quick succession, he retweeted two more accounts featuring white nationalist or Nazi themes . . . In fact, Mr. Trump’s Twitter presence is tightly interwoven with hordes of mostly anonymous accounts trafficking in racist and anti-Semitic attacks . . . almost 30 percent of the accounts Mr. Trump retweeted in turn followed one or more of 50 popular self-identified white nationalist accounts.”
Trump would go on to utterly dominate his Republican competitors and clench the nomination, in May of 2016. At the Republican National Convention, he adopted Richard Nixon’s anti-civil rights slogan of “Law and Order,” which in the 1960s was a not-so-subtle code for clamping down on the Black freedom struggle. The theme for the opening night of the Republican National Convention was “Make Our Country Safe Again:” although crime in the U.S. was in fact at a 50-year low, Trump’s racist portrayal of Mexican rapists, Muslim terrorists, and Black criminality would rule the day. Taking a page from the old fascist playbook, Trump created the image of a crisis that did not actually exist by demonizing marginalized groups, and then portrayed himself as a strong, masculine leader willing to tackle a crisis that other politicians were afraid to even speak of. And, partly because so many White politicians and journalists are still uncomfortable naming White supremacy even when it’s staring them in the face, the fascist walked right in through America’s front door: almost all of this information was available when Trump was elected.
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