Donald Trump’s biographer Michael Wolff offered a blunt read on how the president views the Black community, and why “racist” counts as “high praise” in MAGA world, The Daily Beast reported.
“Clearly, he has some issue with Black people,” Wolff told The Daily Beast Podcast about President Trump. “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.”
The Daily Beast recounted several instances in which Trump has served up “incendiary rhetoric” and exhibited “actions described by his critics as racist.” Trump has denied the accusations and in January 2018 told reporters, “No, no, I’m not a racist. I am the least racist person you have ever interviewed,” according to Politico.
Shortly before those remarks, The Washington Post had reported that Trump “grew frustrated with lawmakers” when “they discussed protecting immigrants from Haiti, El Salvador and African countries as part of a bipartisan immigration deal, according to several people briefed on the meeting.”
“Why are we having all these people from s—— countries come here?” Trump said.
“Trump then suggested that the United States should instead bring more people from countries such as Norway,” the Post reported at the time.
The Daily Beast added that Trump “launched his 2016 election campaign with a speech accusing Mexico of deliberately sending ‘criminals’ and ‘rapists’ across the border into the United States.”
In 2017, Trump “described participants at a white supremacist rally in Charlottesville, Virginia, as ‘very fine people.'”
“In 1973,” The Daily Beast also noted, “the Department of Justice sued Trump and his companies for discriminating against Black renters, and under the Obama administration he was one of the most vocal proponents of the ‘birther’ conspiracy theory.”
Wolff also told The Daily Beast Podcast that Trump “certainly regards Black people as profoundly different from white people.”
And Wolff explained why the word “racist” is “high praise” among Trump’s MAGA base.
“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,” Wolff said.