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In unguarded moments with senior aides, President Trump has maintained that Black Americans have mainly themselves to blame in their struggle for equality, hindered more by lack of initiative than societal impediments, according to current and former U.S. officials.
After phone calls with Jewish lawmakers, Trump has muttered that Jews “are only in it for themselves” and “stick together” in an ethnic allegiance that exceeds other loyalties, officials said.
Trump’s private musings about Hispanics match the vitriol he has displayed in public, and his antipathy to Africa is so ingrained that when first lady Melania Trump planned a 2018 trip to that continent he railed that he “could never understand why she would want to go there.”
Imagine the cognitive dissonance necessary to believe that these Trump aides, Apprentice contestants, and Trump’s own personal lawyer are all part of a deep state conspiracy to wrongly portray as racist a man who refused to rent to Black tenants, took out a full page ad to demand the Central Park Five be lynched, pushed the birther conspiracy, called Mexican immigrants murderers and rapists, oversaw brutally racist immigration policies including child separation and forced sterilization, and, just last week, excreted a condescending “Platinum Plan” that even the Onion would be ashamed to publish as satire, which includes an entire section titled “Education African Americans Can Afford.”