Making America Hate Again

"I am the least racist person," Trump told CNN's Don Lemon on December 9, 2015. Two days earlier, Trump had proposed "a total and complete shutdown of Muslims entering the United States." In his campaign kickoff speech on June 16 of that year he had infamously characterized Mexican immigrants as criminals and rapists. On February 28, 2016, in a television interview with CNN's Jake Tapper Trump declined repeated opportunities to distance himself from expressions of support from former Ku Klux Klan grand wizard David Duke, later blaming a bad earpiece. It was also Tapper who interviewed Trump on June 3, 2016 when Trump declared that Indiana born judge Gonzalo Curiel, who was handling two Trump University lawsuits, was ruling unfairly because "He is a Mexican." (Trump eventually settled the fraud case for $25 million.)

As Vox's German Lopez notes in his profile of Trump's racist history, Trump first appeared in the New York Times in 1973 when the U.S. Department of Justice sued Trump Management Corporation for misrepresenting "to blacks that apartments were not available." The Trumps signed a consent decree two years later. In 1978 the government accused Trump and Co. of violating the consent decree, primarily by steering blacks to specific locations with substandard conditions. According to the Times, the "Trumps effectively wore the government down." The consent decree had expired, and, with the white working-class population of New York on the decline, apparently discrimination became economically infeasible. 

A former employee of Trump's Castle, Atlantic City, told the New Yorker that when Donald and Ivana Trump visited the casino in the 80s, "the bosses would order all the black people off the floor," and put them "in the back."

As recounted by former president of Trump Plaza Hotel and Casino in Atlantic City, John O’Donnell, in his book "Trumped!," Trump managed to slur blacks and Jews in a single quote describing his taste in accountants: 

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. … I think that 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.

In 1992 the Trump Plaza Hotel and Casino was fined $200,000 by the New Jersey Casino Control Commission for removing black and women dealers from tables to accommodate a high-roller's prejudices. 

More recently, Trump promoting the lie that Barack Obama was not born in the U.S. was essentially racist behavior, as was his suggestion that Obama, who was the first black to head the Harvard Law Review, was not a good enough student to be accepted at Ivy League schools.

Racist speech and behavior were also frequent features of Trump campaign events, which seemingly emboldened supporters to act out on their own. In August 2015 two Boston men beat a homeless man with a pipe and urinated on him. When arrested they told police "Donald Trump was right.... All these illegals need to be deported." At a rally in Richmond, VA, on October 14, 2015 Trump supporters clashed with immigration activists, calling for them to "Go back where you came from," and at least one supporter spat on a protester. Later that month at a rally in Miami, FL a pro-immigration protester was dragged to the ground and kicked while other attendees cheered. At the November 2015 rally in Birmingham, AL at which Trump called for surveillance of "certain mosques," several white attendees punched and kicked a black protester who was shouting "black lives matter."  On February 29, 2016 a group of 30 black students standing silently at a Trump rally in a gymnasium at Valdosta State University were asked to leave for no apparent reason. At a March 1, 2016 rally in Louisville, KY, a black woman protester was forcibly removed from the venue by Trump supporters. At a rally in St. Louis, MO on March 11, 2016, supporters called a 16-year old protester "bitch" and "whore," and sucker-punched another. Trump's response was to decry the lack of violence. "... [N]obody wants to hurt each other anymore," he said. "There used to be consequences."

In July 2016 Trump tweeted an image of Hillary Clinton next to a six-pointed star of David, the Jewish symbol Nazis forced Jews to wear. The image, which carried the slogan "Most Corrupt Candidate Ever" was found to have been created by white supremacists on a right-wing online bulletin board. Two months later, Donald Jr. remarked that if his father acted like Hillary Clinton, news media would "be warming up the gas chamber right now." On November 4 the Trump campaign released its final ad, featuring images of prominent Jews (financier George Soros, Federal Reserve Bank chair Janet Yellen, Goldman Sachs CEO Lloyd Blankfein) identifying them as "those who control the levers of power." Hillary Clinton, the ad claimed, partnered "“with these people who don’t have your good in mind.” The ad prompted the Washington Post's Dana Milbank to write:

Anti-Semitism is no longer an undertone of Trump’s campaign. It’s the melody.

In press conferences during February 2017 Trump was twice asked about the rise in antisemitic incidents nationwide, and gave apparently evasive answers. On February 15 during an appearance with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu an Israeli reporter asked "... [W]hat do you say to those among the Jewish community in the states and in Israel and maybe around the world who believe and feel that your administration is playing with xenophobia and maybe racist tones?" Trump began his reply by talking about his electoral college victory (misstating the number of electoral college votes he received). He went on to talk about stopping crime, saying that "There's a lot of bad things that have been taking place over a long period of time," but never explicitly condemned antisemitism.

Trump's election, despite his well-publicized popular vote loss, has been interpreted by some supporters as granting license to their bigoted and racist behavior. In the immediate aftermath of the election, BuzzFeed reported twenty-eight violent or racist incidents. 

In DeWitt, MI, middle school students blocked the path for minority students, telling them to go back to their country, and that they were going to "make America great again."  In Cambridge, MA, a US Postal Service driver yelled at a Hispanic man that he should "go back to your country" because "this is Trump land." At New York University the Muslim prayer room was defaced with pro-Trump graffiti and swastikas posted on several dorm room doors. In Brooklyn, NY a male Trump supporter punched a woman who disagreed with him in the face. At Elon University in North Carolina, a student admitted to writing "Bye bye Latinos hasta la vista" on a classroom blackboard. At a Smith's grocery store in Albuquerque, NM a woman wearing a hijab was harassed by another woman who called her a terrrorist.

In the month following the election the Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC), reported over 1000 bias-related incidents. Thirty-seven percent of them referenced Trump, or campaign slogans, or his remarks about sexual assault. 

• The most frequently reported type of incident was anti-immigrant, and within that, anti-Muslim.
• The most frequently reported location was elementary school (K-12).
• The most frequently reported type of incident referencing Trump was anti-woman.

The independent journal ProPublica reported 330 antisemitic incidents between November 2016 and February 2017. Israeli newsper Haretz reported that 48 Jewish community centers in 26 states received bomb threats in January. More than 100 headstones were damages at a Jewish cemetery in St. Louis, MO; the next week dozens of headstones in a Jewish cemetery in Philadelphia were vandalized. In March a swastika was found carved into the metal door frame of Agudath B'nai Israel synagogue in Cleveland, OH. Swastikas were also found carved into the two students' desks at a Rockville, MD middle school. And in New York City, swastikas were found carved into the doors of the Fourth Universalist Society, which had earlier offered sanctuary to immigrants fearing deportation.

On February 23 two Indian men were shot in a bar in Kansas by a man yelling "Get out of my country!" and racial slurs at his victims, who he apparently thought were Middle Eastern.

At a high school basketball playoff game in Canton, CT, in late February, Canton High School students taunted students from Hartford's predominantly black and Latino Classical Magnet School with "Trump" chants, which appeared to be racially motivated.

A few days later in a suburb of Seattle, WA a Sikh man was shot in his driveway by a assailant who told him "Go back to your own country."

In Tucson, AZ a man broke into a mosque and ripped up copies of the Quran.

On March 10 more than 150 civil and human rights groups issued a letter calling on the Trump administration " to respond more quickly and forcefully to hate-based incidents...." 

... the President and his surrogates have too frequently used rhetoric and proposed and enacted policies that have fostered a hostile environment toward many, including African Americans, Muslims and those perceived to be Muslim, and immigrant and refugee communities. The President cannot condemn hate in one sentence and then in the same speech, promote falsehoods that can lead to bias and hate violence.