Confronting The Coded Racism of Donald Trump
Ari Melber | April 27, 2011
If there were any doubts about the racial animus driving Donald Trump's attacks on Barack Obama, the billionaire reality show star exposed himself with his latest conspiracy. On Monday night, Trump questioned how Obama could possible have been admitted to Ivy League schools, since Trump "heard" Obama was a "terrible student." Trump told the A.P <1>. that he was investigating the issue, whatever that means, just as he claims to have dispatched investigators to Hawaii in order to find the President's famous birth certificate.
"How does a bad student go to Columbia and then to Harvard?" Trump said. "I'm thinking about it, I'm certainly looking into it. Let him show his records."
By charging that Obama was not admitted based on merit, Trump is suggesting that Obama was admitted because he is black.
In G.O.P. politics, attacking racial minorities as the underachieving beneficiaries of affirmative action <2> is a very old move. Sen. Jesse Helms produced the most notorious example, an ad <3> against his black opponent, Harvey Grant, which blasted affirmative action for taking jobs from deserving white people and giving them to minorities. Even that dark salvo, however, was putatively linked to jobs and active policy debates. Trump is not so smooth. He is blatantly attacking Obama's teenage qualifications for college -- a topic so obscure, it was a non-issue in Obama's exhaustive, two-year-long presidential campaign. Coupled with the rage of the Birthers, Trump's adopted conspiracy crowd, the mogul looks more like he is auditioning for a talk radio gig than the presidency.
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