Donald Trump’s former lawyer Michael Cohen just made a shocking allegation against the president — one which, if true, would contradict everything we thought we knew about the commander-in-chief.
In an interview with Vanity Fair, Cohen claims that, before he became president, Trump repeatedly made racist remarks in his presence. Specifically, Cohen recalls the following incidents:
• In the late 2000s, while they were driving through an impoverished Chicago neighborhood en route to the Trump International Hotel, Donald turned to him and said, “Only the blacks could live like this.”
• When Nelson Mandela died, Trump challenged Cohen to “name one country run by a black person that’s not a shithole,” then dared him to “name one city.”
• Once, when discussing the various winners of past seasons of The Apprentice, Trump explained that, in season one, he decided not to pick finalist Kwame Jackson because “there’s no way I can let this black f-g win.”
• In 2016, after Cohen told Trump that he’d watched his rally on TV — and thought that the crowd had “looked vanilla” — the presidential candidate replied, “That’s because black people are too stupid to vote for me.”
If true, Cohen’s recollections would mean that when the president said, “I’m the least racist person anybody is going to meet,” he was not being entirely truthful.
Still, there’s reason to question whether Trump would really make comments as racially charged as those that Cohen attributes to him. After all, Cohen is not known for his honesty, and has been in a public feud with his former employer for months now.
And besides, other than that time he suggested that Mexican immigrants are mostly rapists; or said he didn’t want people from “shithole countries” like Haiti and countries in Africa coming to the United States; or systematically discriminated against African-Americans in his housing developments; or propagated a conspiracy theory about how the first black president wasn’t really an American; or insisted that there were “very fine people” marching with neo-Nazis in Charlottesville; or employed a personal butler who wrote on Facebook that Barack Obama should be lynched; or likened nonwhite immigrants to vermin; or called for banning Muslims from the United States; or encouraged U.S. soldiers to fire on a caravan of Central American women and children at the slightest provocation, what has the president ever done in public to suggest that he is capable of saying such bigoted things in private?
