The Democrats running for president all agree: President Trump is a racist.
Democrats in Congress also agree: President Trump is a racist.
Democrats in Hollywood likewise assent to what seems to be a self-evident proposition: President Trump is a racist.
But one Democrat, Andrew Stein, former Manhattan Borough president and president of the New York City Council, does not agree, and he said so in an opinion piece for The Hill.
Trump, he wrote, “is no racist.”
Trump Quick to Help Minorities
Stein, who is Jewish, wrote that he’s known Trump for 46 years and has “never seen any indication or any form of racism. In fact, quite the contrary.”
When he was chieftain of the city council, he asked Trump “numerous times to help black or Hispanic groups, and he always came through, many times without publicity.”
When a hurricane ravished Puerto Rico in the mid 1980s, I asked many big companies to give various forms of assistance — but the problem was how to get all of this aid down to Puerto Rico. I called Donald Trump, and he provided us with a 727 jet to take all of the donated material down to the island, and he didn’t ask for any publicity for that generous act.
My friend, Rev. Floyd Flake, the minister of the largest black church in Queens, asked for some help for his senior center. Again, I called Donald Trump and he wrote a big check.
Trump also rescued a homeless black woman and two kids from homelessness “without any fanfare,” Stein wrote.
Trump, Stein wrote, didn’t attack Representative Elijah Cummings of Maryland’s 7th congressional district, which includes half of what Trump described as rat-infested Baltimore, because Cummings is black. Rather, Trump “is a counter-puncher. And he is right that Cummings has been a congressman for 22 years and that Baltimore, part of which is in his congressional district, is a mess. The city has gotten worse during his tenure: more poverty, more drugs and more crime.”
“The president is honest and doesn’t parse his words, like most politicians, and that drives the media crazy. But his honesty is refreshing, and he is usually right, if not always diplomatic,” Stein wrote.
Stein then listed Trump’s accomplishments vis-à-vis black Americans. Under Trump, black unemployment is at a 60-year low, and the president has pushed policies to help black communities with tax breaks and grants. “In short, he has done more for minorities in three years than President Obama did in eight, and he deserves credit instead of rebuke.”
And Stein reminded readers that Barack Obama’s actions might lead one to believe he was an anti-white, anti-Semitic bigot.
• Obama sat in Reverend Jeremiah Wright’s “church” and listened to the crackpot rail against whites, Jews, and his own country.
• Obama was frequently in the company of the Reverend Louis Farrakhan, and spoke highly of the deranged chieftain of Nation of Islam, despite his famous characterization of the Jews as a “gutter religion.” Farrakhan thinks white people are “devils,” but Obama didn’t care.
• And Obama is a fast friend of the Reverend Al Sharpton, who, despite being a “race-baiter,” was a guest in the White House “dozens of times.”
Stein didn’t mention Sharpton’s role in the anti-white Tawana Brawley hoax, his role in anti-Semitic violence in New York City’s Crown Heights, or his famous challenge to New York’s Jews: “If the Jews want to get it on, tell them to pin their yarmulkes back and come over to my house.”
Obama is not and was not a racist even if “he did things that could be construed as racially divisive — and yet, he was never widely criticized for it, nor was he publicly condemned as a racist,” Stein wrote.
But “President Trump is not a racist, either — and yet, he is being condemned as one by his critics on the left, and by much of the mainstream media.”
The Washington Post published a piece similar to Stein’s.
The Narrative
The truth is that the Left was pushing the “Trump is a racist” narrative even before he received the GOP nomination.
The headline over Dana Milbank’s column in the Washington Post on December 1, 2015 stated it this way: “Donald Trump is a bigot and a racist.”
Trump was also a “birther,” Milbank wrote, and said other things that Milbank didn’t like.
And so it goes, four years later, with his likely Democratic opponent in 2020, former Vice President Joe Biden, who claims the president wants to shoot illegal aliens, supports violent white supremacists, and, indeed, provides “safe harbor to white supremacists and neo-Nazis, to the Ku Klux Klan.”
All of which is objectively, categorically false. But don’t expect Stein’s apologia to get much notice.
Photo: AP Images
