The Rhetoric and Reality of Donald Trump’s Racism

Next month, Jamestown will mark four hundred years since the first slaves set foot in North America—a year before the Mayflower’s Pilgrims landed in Plymouth Harbor. There were only “twenty and odd,” according to an early account from John Rolfe, Virginia’s first tobacco planter and the widower of Pocahontas. The slaves had been captured in Angola and herded, with hundreds of others, onto a slave ship bound for Veracruz, in today’s Mexico. British pirates seized them in a raid on the high seas while searching for gold and silver. In Jamestown, the pirates exchanged their human loot for provisions. Jamestown became ground zero for slavery in the Americas. Among that first generation were Isabella and Antony, who worked in the household of Captain William Tucker. They were allowed to marry, according to historical accounts in Jamestown. In 1624, their son William was the first recorded birth of an African-American in what became the United States.

On Tuesday, President Trump visited Jamestown, which is also marking four hundred years since settlers there founded the first representative assembly in the Western Hemisphere. In 1619, twenty-two representatives of local settlements and plantations met in a small wooden church to create a new legislative body, the House of Burgesses. Jamestown was ground zero for democracy in the Americas, too. Four hundred years later, the theme on Tuesday was not the celebration of democracy but the stench of racism that has increasingly pervaded Trump’s Presidency. Most recently, the President, on Twitter, attacked four congresswomen of color and Representative Elijah Cummings, an African-American politician who represents Baltimore. Cummings is the chairman of the House Oversight Committee, which recently subpoenaed the personal e-mails and texts of Trump, his inner circle, and his key associates. The President says he is simply attacking his critics, but his remarks repeatedly smack of racism.

As he left the White House, en route to Jamestown, Trump told reporters that he was “the least racist person” in the world. “What I’ve done for African-Americans in two and a half years, no President has been able to do anything like it,” he said. “Unemployment at the lowest level in the history of our country for African-Americans—nobody can beat that. You look at poverty levels. They’re doing better than they’ve ever done before.” (This is statistically true, but some experts question if Trump is solely responsible for it.) Trump added, “So many things: opportunity zones, criminal-justice reform. President Obama couldn’t get it done.” The biggest beneficiaries of his Presidency, he insisted, are African-Americans. He claimed that the White House had received more letters, e-mails, and phone calls about his stance against Cummings and, as he put it in tweets over the weekend, the “disgusting, rat and rodent-infested mess” in Baltimore than on any other subject. “We have a large African-American population and they really appreciate what I’m doing,” he said, “and they’ve let me know it.”

View the complete the July 31 article by Robin Wright on The New Yorker website here.