Is Harassment of Public Figures Acceptable: Your Sincere Opinion

[Angrboda]

For the long followers of Trump’s career, however, none of these incendiary remarks are especially surprising. Trump has a long record as a provocateur on matters of race and ethnicity.

It starts in 1973, when the United States Department of Justice went to court with a discrimination complaint against the Trump family business, which rented apartments across Brooklyn and Queens. Coming from the administration of Richard Nixon, who was hardly a civil rights agitator, the complaint was based on an investigation that found four different Trump employees confirming that applicants for leases were screened by race. One rental agent said Trump’s father had told him not to rent to blacks and that he actually wanted to reduce the number of African Americans in his buildings. Three doormen said they had been instructed to deflect blacks who came to Trump buildings to apply for apartments.

Though just 26 years old at the time, Donald Trump was already president of the Trump Organization. Rather than work with the government to bring the company into compliance with the law, as the New York apartment king Sam LeFrak had done, Trump retained one of the most notorious lawyers in the country, Roy Cohn, and commence an all-out legal war. Cohn, who had been Joe McCarthy’s chief inquisitor during the senator’s witch hunt for communists in the government, filed a $410 million lawsuit against the federal government and smeared the justice department attorneys with terms such as “storm troopers” and “Gestapo.” Trump complained in the press of “reverse discrimination” and alleged a “nationwide drive” to force landlords to “rent to welfare recipients.”

In the early 1970s, “African American” and “welfare” were used interchangeably and it was a well-established hallmark of dog-whistle politics, which allowed speakers to appeal to racist beliefs without using openly racist terms. More whites used welfare assistance than blacks, but welfare was regarded by some as a special benefit for minorities. In 1980 the coded language that matched welfare with undeserving minorities was revealed as Ronald Reagan spoke of “welfare queens” and “strapping young bucks.”

Trump’s countersuit in the fair housing case brought against his company was dismissed by a judge who considered it a “waste of paper.” The Trump organization eventually accommodated the feds, agreeing to a protocol intended to address the mistakes of the past.

http://fortune.com/2016/06/07/donald-tru...sm-quotes/

Nineteen fucking seventy-three, Neo.