by Keith Boykin
In Sarah Palin, I could see the future of the Republican Party. The John McCains and the Mitt Romneys who practiced the old-school politics of collegiality and bipartisanship would soon become extinct. They would be replaced by political neophytes, opportunists, and conspiracy theorists who openly embraced the extremists in their party. As renowned political scientists Thomas E. Mann and Norman J. Ornstein observed as far back as 2012, the Republican Party has become “an insurgent outlier” in American politics. “It is ideologically extreme; scornful of compromise; unmoved by conventional understanding of facts, evidence and science; and dismissive of the legitimacy of its political opposition,” they wrote in the Washington Post. It was during this time, in the midst of the Obama era, that the Republican Party had become so divorced from reality and so obsessed with racial grievance that the road to Donald Trump seemed inevitable.
As America was becoming more inclusive of women and people of color, John McCain’s selection of Sarah Palin to be his running mate represented a generational shift for Republicans. The country club establishment wing of the party had tried for decades to disguise its plutocratic agenda with white resentment populism and specious arguments of anti-elitism, but it needed fresh new voices to represent its interests for the changing times. It was a transition that had been decades in the making, as when Bush chose forty-one-year-old Indiana Senator Dan Quayle to be his running mate in 1988. Bush strategists openly admitted to the press that the blond-haired politician, who was said to resemble the actor Robert Redford, had been chosen, in part, for his looks. They argued to the Los Angeles Times that Quayle “would bring glamour to the ticket.” Even John McCain openly predicted that Quayle’s alleged good looks might appeal to women. “I can’t believe a guy that handsome wouldn’t be attractive in some respect,” he said. But Quayle was clearly a lightweight—he would later become famous for miscorrecting a student on the spelling of the word “potato”—who needed to reassure the public of his competence. In his vice presidential debate with Texas senator Lloyd Bentsen, Quayle foolishly invited a comparison of himself to young John F. Kennedy when he ran for president. Bentsen was not impressed. The sixty-seven-year-old Texan turned to face Quayle, who refused to look Bentsen in the eye, and addressed him like a schoolboy. “Senator, I served with Jack Kennedy. I knew Jack Kennedy. Jack Kennedy was a friend of mine. Senator, you’re no Jack Kennedy.”
The audience roared. I sat in a press room near the auditorium in Omaha that night thinking that Bentsen’s zinger might resurrect Dukakis’s flagging campaign and expose the Republican senator for the empty suit that he was. The sound bite made great television, but I soon realized that it did not affect the campaign. Republicans were never seriously worried about Quayle’s lack of experience or intelligence. This had become the brand of modern conservatism. It was part of the same anti-intellectual tradition that chose the former B-list actor Ronald Reagan as governor of California and then president of the United States. It was the tradition that had once led Richard Nixon to denounce Democratic presidential nominee Adlai Stevenson as an “egghead.” And it was part of the tradition that motivated conservative intellectual William F. Buckley to denounce Ivy League academics: “I would rather be governed by the first 2,000 people in the Boston telephone directory than by the 2,000 people on the faculty at Harvard University,” said the famous Yale graduate.
While Democratic presidents like Kennedy sought “the best and the brightest” for their teams, Republicans found an opportunity to characterize them as elitists who were out of touch with everyday people. It did not matter that the vast majority of presidents of both parties had attended elite institutions, or that every Republican presidential nominee from 2000 to 2020 had been born into privilege with a famous father. The Republican argument was about tone, not reality. It fit with the party’s Southern strategy by appealing to the racial resentment of white Americans who felt they had been left behind and betrayed by liberal elitists in their own racial ranks. In language both coded and uncoded, Republicans learned to speak to non-college-educated white people without offering any serious solutions beyond blaming nonwhite people for their problems.
The conservative strategy was to “starve the beast,” as they referred to the government. They would cut taxes that support the government, simultaneously comforting the country club Republicans, who could keep more of their income, and the white working-class Republicans, who were misled to believe that government services were primarily enabling Black and brown people. Any Republican president could implement this strategy—a second-rate actor, a failed oilman, or a bankrupt real estate developer. As antitax activist Grover Norquist admitted in a 2012 speech to the Conservative Political Action Conference, “We just need a president to sign this stuff. We don’t need someone to think it up or design it.” Norquist’s only rule was to “pick a Republican with enough working digits to handle a pen to become president of the United States.”
With the bar set so low, it is not hard to understand how a national party that once nominated experienced statesmen like Barry Goldwater and Richard Nixon would eventually come to nominate actors and performers like Ronald Reagan and Donald Trump. You could trace the origins from Reagan’s rehearsed lines to the studied seriousness of the lightweight Dan Quayle, from the malapropisms of the oilman George W. Bush to the willful ignorance of the hockey mom Sarah Palin. After nominating such a progressively worse string of candidates, you could see the Republican Party’s devolution to the incompetent narcissism of the game show host Donald Trump. He was not an aberration from Republican history, but a direct extension and natural evolution of decades of conservative bigotry and anti-intellectualism.
From the day Donald Trump descended the escalator into the lobby of his New York skyscraper to launch his unlikely presidential campaign, the Trump operation became a spectacle of buffoonery and bigotry. “I will be the greatest jobs president that God ever created,” he not so humbly predicted. “I will build a great, great wall on our southern border. And I will have Mexico pay for that wall,” he promised. “When Mexico sends its people, they’re not sending their best,” Trump complained. “They’re bringing drugs. They’re bringing crime. They’re rapists. And some, I assume, are good people,” he said.
Trump’s rambling announcement speech reflected a stunning departure from political norms, but it would become characteristic of his chaotic leadership style in office. He would zigzag from topic to topic, reeling off sound bites that reflected his transparent ignorance of the topic discussed, but before anyone could process the nonsense of his remarks, he was onto another topic and another sound bite, another scandal and another controversy. He spoke not from evidence, but from intuition, and, more specifically, from the intuition of a privileged septuagenarian white man accustomed to enthralling adoring audiences and unaccustomed to being challenged. Chaos was his survival skill in life, in business and in politics. It successfully diverted attention from one scandal after another. For those who had never paid serious attention to Trump, his antics were, perhaps, shocking to watch in real time. But for those who knew of his long history of ill-informed, inappropriate, and inflammatory language, it was, sadly, nothing new.
As Trump became more popular among Republicans, his defenders tried to conceal his history of racism and xenophobia. Look, he has Black friends, they explained, pointing to photographs of Trump with Don King, Rosa Parks, Jesse Jackson, and Al Sharpton. For millions of African Americans, who had grown tired of such “Black friends” arguments, the collage of photos that suddenly appeared on social media did nothing to alleviate their concerns. And for millions of New Yorkers, who knew the brash real estate developer from years of outrageous newspaper headlines, his self-serving photo ops did nothing to erase the decades of racism in his public history.
When a thirty-three-year-old Black nurse from Harlem tried to rent a one-bedroom apartment in Queens, the building’s rental agent talked to his boss, Fred Trump, to ask him what to do. “Take the applic
ation and put it in a drawer and leave it there,” he responded. It was 1963, and the elder Trump was grooming his son, Donald, to take over the family business. The young Donald Trump, according to the New York Times, was “spending much of his free time touring construction sites in his father’s Cadillac, driven by a Black chauffeur.” Ten years later, Trump had become president of his father’s business when a front-page story in the Times exposed him: “Major Landlord Accused of Antiblack Bias in City,” the headline blared. The Nixon administration, not known for aggressive civil rights enforcement, had accused Trump of racial discrimination, in violation of the Fair Housing Act of 1968. Trump’s scheme reportedly involved a coding system, in which applications from people of color were marked with a large “C,” while applications from whites were not. A lawyer in the Justice Department told The Atlantic that Trump even admitted to her, “You know, you don’t want to live with them either.” When Trump finally settled the case, he told the Times that he was satisfied with the agreement because it did not compel his company “to accept persons on welfare as tenants unless as qualified as any other tenant.” Even in defeat, Trump perpetuated racist stereotypes that conflated race—the subject of the lawsuit—with poverty, an argument he would repeat decades later in the final weeks of his 2020 reelection campaign.
Trump’s racist behavior would continue for four decades in public life, often obscured by the glitzy spectacle of his tabloid lifestyle. By the 1980s, as Trump expanded his business to Atlantic City casinos, he took his racism along with him. As former Trump casino worker Kip Brown told The New Yorker in 2015, “When Donald and Ivana came to the casino, the bosses would order all the Black people off the floor.” It was a pattern of discrimination that would continue in his casino business until at least the next decade.
In 1989, Trump launched his most famous racist diatribe when a twenty-eight-year-old white woman was raped while jogging in New York’s Central Park. Rather than allowing the criminal justice process to provide the accused defendants a fair trial and administer justice, Trump stoked white fears with a bitter public relations campaign. “You better believe that I hate the people that took this girl and raped her brutally,” he told a press conference. “You better believe it. And it’s more than anger. It’s hatred. And I want society to hate them,” he said. While positioning himself as the defender of white women’s virtue, Trump manipulated the public by using his wealth, race, and social status to lead the charge against the five unknown, low-income Black and brown defendants, ultimately taking out full-page advertisements in New York City newspapers, calling on the government to “bring back the death penalty.”
The four African American teenagers and one Latino teen who had been falsely accused never stood a chance. Despite the conflicting and coerced confessions from the boys about the alleged events, the absence of any physical evidence connecting them to the crime scene, and the lack of even a single witness—including the victim—who could identify any of them as a perpetrator of the heinous crime, they were all convicted and sent to prison. Yet even after Antron McCray, Kevin Richardson, Yusef Salaam, Korey Wise, and Raymond Santana were exonerated by DNA evidence; even after the real rapist, Matias Reyes, later confessed to the crime; and even after New York paid a $41 million settlement for wrongful imprisonment, Trump continued to claim the five Black and brown victims of his lynch mob were guilty of a crime they did not commit. He never apologized for leading his ugly crusade against them.
A former Trump employee shared yet another disturbing story in a 1991 book called Trumped! Author John O’Donnell recalled a lunch conversation in which Trump complained about one of his Black workers. “I think that the guy is lazy,” Trump said. “And it’s probably not his fault, because laziness is a trait in blacks. It really is, I believe that. It’s not anything they can control.” In the same conversation, Trump reportedly complained about his Black accountants. “Black guys counting my money! I hate it. The only kind of people I want counting my money are short guys that wear yarmulkes every day.” Trump acknowledged the remarks in a 1997 Playboy interview. “The stuff O’Donnell wrote about me is probably true,” he said. But two years later, Trump denied the story during a TV interview on Meet the Press after he had announced his unsuccessful Reform Party campaign for president.
Trump’s casinos would remain a continuing source of racial tension throughout his career. When a high-rolling gambler arrived at his Atlantic City casino, management removed a Black dealer from his station to accommodate the gambler’s racist preferences. The New Jersey Casino Control Commission forced Trump to pay a $200,000 fine in that case. In another case, Trump testified to Congress in 1993 that some Native American casinos should be blocked because he doubted the authenticity of their ancestry. “If you look at some of the reservations that you’ve approved,” Trump told a congressional committee, “I will tell you right now, they don’t look like Indians to me.” When another Native American casino worried Trump, advertisements appeared in local newspapers with an inflammatory headline: “How Much Do You Really Know About the St. Regis Mohawk Indians?” The words ran below a grainy image of hypodermic needles, lines of cocaine, and drug paraphernalia. “The St. Regis Mohawk Indian record of criminal activity is well documented,” the ad said. “Are these the new neighbors we want?” The ad claimed to be paid for by a group called the New York Institute for Law and Society, but, as the New York Times later reported, it was actually bankrolled by a competing casino operator. His name was Donald Trump.
After four real estate bankruptcies in the 1990s, Trump turned to television, but controversy followed him there as well. Predicting that racial conflict would be good for ratings, Trump came up with an idea to create a battle of the races—Black people versus white people—on his TV show, The Apprentice. “Whether people like that idea or not, it is somewhat reflective of our very vicious world,” he said. Race issues also proved problematic when a Black contestant on the show was kicked off for being too smart. Kevin Allen, a Wharton graduate, would later explain that Trump “doesn’t like educated African Americans very much.” It was not surprising. Years earlier, Trump told NBC’s Bryant Gumbel that “a well-educated Black has a tremendous advantage over a well-educated white in terms of the job market.” Although “a Black may think that they don’t have an advantage,” Trump knew better. “If I were starting off today, I would love to be a well-educated Black, because I believe they do have an actual advantage,” Trump said. Contrary to the revisionist history of the Trump presidency that African Americans never complained about Trump’s racial politics before he ran for president, African American film director Spike Lee appeared on the same 1989 NBC program moments after Trump and condemned the real estate developer’s ignorance. “I certainly don’t agree with that garbage that Donald Trump said,” Spike Lee told NBC’s Bryant Gumbel. Lee could not believe Trump actually said that on national television, and as he shook his head in disgust, Gumbel and the audience laughed.
The laughter was the problem. Until he was elected president, no one took Donald Trump seriously as a political figure. As a garish, self-promoting playboy, he had earned a regular spot in the scandal-seeking New York tabloids and had become a punch line in comedians’ jokes. His alleged wealth also afforded him the privilege of eccentricity, and that, in turn, insulated him from questioning that would have been directed at more serious political figures. Yet the public acquiescence of that eccentricity came with an expectation that the real estate developer would stay in his lane. He was allowed to share his ridiculously sexist, racist, and xenophobic opinions in public forums because he was perceived to be harmless as long as he was merely entertaining with his stupidity and not governing with it. But here he was in 1989, a privileged white man, who had been born into wealth, who had dodged the draft in Vietnam with his family’s help, who had inherited his father’s successful real estate company and racist business practices, who had already failed in several business ventures, and who was on the verge of his first
of six bankruptcies—none of which prompted the slightest moment of public introspection or humility—appearing on national television to lecture Black people that they were, in fact, the privileged ones.
After Trump’s well-documented, four-decade-long history of racial hostility and insensitivity, it was no surprise when he launched a racist campaign against the nation’s first Black president. Trump told NBC’s Meredith Vieira in 2011 that he had dispatched investigators to Hawaii to research Obama’s origins, “and they cannot believe what they’re finding.” He promised ABC’s George Stephanopoulos that he would release his income tax returns if Obama released his birth certificate. And when Obama did release his birth certificate, Trump still refused to release his tax returns, telling CNN’s Candy Crowley, “it’s not a birth certificate.” He only backed down after he won the Republican nomination, more than five years later, in 2016. “President Barack Obama was born in the United States,” he told a press conference. He never apologized.