The first time Donald Trump appeared in the New York Times, back in 1973, was an article on a Department of Justice lawsuit accusing him and his father of anti-Black bias, and one of his biographers says he's seen the president's racism up close.
The president has appeared in the pages of his hometown paper thousands of times since then, including numerous articles accusing him of being racist – such as one from February titled, "As Trump Attacks Diversity, a Racist Undercurrent Surfaces" – and author Michael Wolff provided some new insight on that bigotry to The Daily Beast Podcast.
“Clearly, he has some issue with Black people,” Wolff told the podcast on Thursday. “The world is a better place to him without Black people, or without having to be aware of Black people, without Black people somehow in what he considers a zero sum game with white people.”
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The president made his entrance into national politics with racist "birther" conspiracy theories about Barack Obama and has for decades maintained the mostly Black teenagers known as the "Central Park Five" were responsible for the rape of a white woman in 1989, although all five were exonerated in 2002, and slurred Latin American immigrants as “criminals” and “rapists” and referred to Haiti and African nations as "s---hole countries," according to reports.
“Trump certainly regards Black people as profoundly different from white people,” Wolff said. “I mean the word racist now becomes in the Trump world a kind of high praise, because it’s meant to suggest the liberal overreach and the liberals call anybody racist.”