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OpEdNews Op Eds    H4'ed 7/28/16

The Content of Donald Trump's Character

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Message Marjorie Cohn
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Reprinted from Consortium News

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Donald Trump
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In his acceptance speech for the Republican presidential nomination, Donald Trump declared, "My Dad, Fred Trump, was the smartest and hardest working man I ever knew...It's because of him that I learned, from my youngest age, to respect the dignity of work and the dignity of working people."

Donald apparently forgot what his father taught him. The GOP nominee refuses to pay the people who work for him. "Among them: a dishwasher in Florida. A glass company in New Jersey. A carpet company. A plumber. Painters. Forty-eight waiters. Dozens of bartenders and other hourly workers at his resorts and clubs, coast to coast. Real estate brokers who sold his properties. And, ironically, several law firms that once represented him in these suits and others," wrote Steve Reilly in USA Today.

Moreover, Fred Trump, "the smartest" man his son ever knew, did not respect the dignity of black people. The legendary folk singer Woody Guthrie rented an apartment in the elder Trump's Brooklyn complex in 1950. It turned out blacks were not welcome there.

University of Central Lancashire professor Will Kaufman, a student of Guthrie's life and songs, noted that Guthrie thought "Fred Trump was one who stirs up racial hate, and implicitly profits from it," lamenting "the bigotry that pervaded his new, lily-white neighborhood."

Guthrie responded to Fred Trump's bigotry with this song:

I suppose

Old Man Trump knows

Just how much

Racial Hate

He stirred up

In the bloodpot of human hearts

When he drawed

That color line

Here at his Eighteen hundred family project

The acorn did not fall far from the tree of racial prejudice. In 1973, the Nixon Justice Department sued Fred and Donald Trump for systematic discrimination against African-Americans in housing rentals.

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Marjorie Cohn is professor emerita at Thomas Jefferson School of Law, former president of the National Lawyers Guild, deputy secretary general of the International Association of Democratic Lawyers, and a member of the National Advisory Board of Veterans for Peace. Her most recent book is Drones and Targeted Killing: Legal, Moral, and Geopolitical Issues. See  (more...)
 

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