Congress Shouldn't Need Cohen to Tell Them Trump Is Racist

By Christianna Silva


On Wednesday, February 27, Michael Cohen, President Donald Trump’s former lawyer and “fixer,” appeared in Washington, D.C. To testify before the Residence Oversight Committee about his history with his former employer.


“I am ashamed because I know what Mr. Trump is,” Cohen mentioned in his beginning remarks to the committee. “He is a racist. He's a conman. He's a cheat. He was a presidential candidate who knew that Roger Stone was talking with Julian Assange about a WikiLeaks drop of DNC emails.”


Per the New York Times, Cohen did not hold back. "The nation has seen Mr. Trump court white supremacists and bigots," he mentioned, and further that the now-president "once asked me if I may name a nation operated by a Black person that wasn’t a 's--thole.' This was as soon as Barack Obama was President of the United States. While we were once driving through a struggling neighborhood in Chicago, he commented that only Black people could live that way. And, he informed me that Black people would never vote for him because they were also stupid."


"And but I continued to work for him," Cohen added. Cohen knew Trump's views and ideologies, and still chose to work for him for at least a decade. That he is currently revealing his tips into Trump's person does not absolve or exonerate him for the work he did in connection with the Trump Organization.


Cohen was sentenced to three years in prison in December 2018 on one count of lying to Congress, and for campaign finance violations related to paying ladies who'd allegedly experienced sexual encounters with Trump. Per the Day-to-day Beast, Home Oversight Committee chairman Elijah Cummings explained that the committee “[has] no interest in inappropriately interfering with any ongoing criminal investigations, and to that end, we are in the method of consulting with Special Counsel Mueller’s office.” It remains to be seen how Cohen’s testimony will result in any further investigations, and if so, to what extent.


Although, as New York-based lawyer Luppe Luppen told MTV News, Cohen’s appearance scrutinizes “the politics around Trump typically and the interpersonal connection between the two gentlemen. It's clear they've had a bad falling out and segment of this is score-settling for Cohen. For those of us in the public, it may be taken either as sour grapes from someone facing a long time in prison or validation of what we've observed on the outdoor from someone who spent a lot of time as a Trump insider.”


Some of Cohen’s testimony is scathing — a presidential candidate aware that someone was hacking into DNC emails for his own political increase should be shocking on its own — but it’s telling that the in general reception of Cohen’s remarks usually be far less revelatory than a corroboration of what several people already thought to be true. The allegation that President Donald Trump is racist, as an example, isn't a new one, and it’s not even the initial time that this has come from Cohen: A November 2018 interview he gave to Vanity Fair featured several of the same anecdotes because the ones in his prepared remarks. Although other people have been calling Trump’s actions racist dating back decades, and for reasons Cohen didn’t mention.


Imagine how the now-president kicked off his 2016 presidential bid: by disparaging all Mexican immigrants. “They are not our friend, believe me,” Trump mentioned at the time. “They’re bringing narcotics. They’re bringing crime. They’re rapists. And then some, I assume, are good people.”


And that’s not nearly the initial – or maybe most recent – time Trump has come under fire for being racist. Among other moments:

• • Before his political career even began, as soon as Trump was a real estate tycoon in the 1970s, he was accused of refusing to rent to Black people, which led the Department of Justice to sue his firm twice.




• • He has allegedly made a few racist remarks to numerous people over the years; in 1989, he indicated to Fortune magazine that affirmative action has a negative effect on white people. “A well-educated Black has a tremendous advantage over a well-educated white in terms of the job market. … If I was beginning off today, I would love to be a well-educated Black, because I really do believe they have the particular advantage today,” he mentioned at the time, per the Washington Post.




• • In the late 1980s, Trump took out a series of ads in favor of the death penalty around the time that the Central Park Five — five Black and Latino teenagers who were falsely accused of raping a white woman in Central Park — were on trial. All five were convicted of numerous charges; it was only soon after a confession by another man and corroborating DNA evidence that they were cleared of all expenses. Trump has continued to argue that they are guilty despite the dismissal of their expenditures, plus a $40 million settlement paid to them by the city of New York.




• • On the back of the “birther” conspiracy, Trump claimed, for a shockingly long time, that President Barack Obama was not place on Earth in the U.S., Despite zero evidence to the contrary.




• • Throughout the 2016 presidential election, Trump insulted the family member of a Muslim fallen soldier  by targeting the way the soldier’s mother grieved: “If you look at his spouse, she was standing there. She had nothing to mention. She probably, maybe she wasn’t allowed to have anything to mention. You tell me,” Trump mentioned in July 2016.




• • In May 2016, Trump mentioned a federal judge shouldn’t hear the Trump University case because he was Mexican. “We’re creating a wall between here and Mexico. Response The answer is, he is giving us very unfair rulings—rulings that people can’t even believe,” he mentioned at the time.




• • Trump also tweeted out a anti-Semitic meme about Hillary Clinton throughout the 2016 presidential election. The tweet has since been deleted.




• • While campaigning in 2016, Trump pointed to a Black man at one of his rallies and mentioned, “Look at my African-American over there.”




• • The New York Times reported that throughout a June 2017 meeting in the Oval Office, Trump mentioned that Haitians “all have AIDS.”




• • While in that same tirade, Trump also reportedly said Nigerian immigrants wouldn’t ever “go back to their huts” if they first traveled to the U.S.




• • And on a meeting on January 4, 2018, Trump referred to immigrants from Haiti and all 54 countries in Africa as coming from “s--thole countries.”

Although despite this overwhelming evidence, Republican congressman Mark Meadows determined to bring Lynne Patton, Black woman as well as a former Trump Business employee who currently works for the Department of Housing and Urban Development, to the hearing. There, he talked for her, and asked Cohen: “You made some very demeaning comments about the president that Ms. Patton doesn’t agree with. She says, as a daughter of a gentleman place on Earth in Birmingham, Alabama, that there really is no way she would work for a sole who was racist. How do you reconcile the two of those?”


As New York Magazine reports, Cohen replied, “As the son of a Holocaust survivor, neither should I,” ostensibly referring to the President’s history of anti-Semitic tropes.


Of course, Trump employing one or more Black people does not mean he cannot hold racist beliefs or exhibit racist actions. It’s a false equivalency. His past actions – here, making companions with or hiring Black people — never forever absolve him of racism. Representatives Ayanna Pressley and Rashida Tlaib both addressed that point in the chamber.


“Would you agree that someone could deny rental units to African-Americans, lead the birther movement, refer to the diaspora as ‘shithole countries,’ and refer to white supremacists as ‘fine people,’ have a Black friend and still be racist?” Pressley asked Cohen. His only answer was an eas “Yes.”


Tlaib also called out Meadows for using Patton as a silent prop. “Just because someone has a person of color, a Black person working for them, does not mean they aren’t racist … The fact that someone would actually use a prop, a Black woman, in this chamber, in this committee, is alone racist in itself,” she mentioned. Meadows responded by calling Tlaib racist against him for singling his action out as racist.


These females all know Trump’s track record; so do most of them white male Republicans who spent the bulk of their time attempting to discredit Cohen. Nevertheless whether or not those boys would have considered one of their own over the countless people who have called Trump racist over the years — including Congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and former White Residence advisor Omarosa Manigault-Newman — is beside the point. They have had years to come to this conclusion, as the signs have habitually been there. That they have seemingly chosen to disregard those signs, or at least don't think about the anger and hurt voiced by scores of minority groups, is exceptionally telling.


As Luppen points out, people already believe what they aspire to believe, and testimony like Cohen’s isn’t likely to sway those mindsets. “Thus far, people's suggestions of Trump seem to have been pretty set in stone and don't change much any time new facts come out,” he says.


The truth is that some people might never care that Trump has been called racist; case in point, that’s why white supremacists like him. For most each person else, but, it is and should be a major cause for concern, especially as Trump keeps it up and continues to petition for a wall at the U.S.’S southern border with Mexico, and maintains control over legislation that may disproportionately affect minority groups.


So Cohen instructed them Home Oversight Committee, and all Residents of the
U.S., That Trump is racist. Nevertheless in case you really need Cohen to tell you what to think about Trump as soon as the signs were already there, perhaps it’s time to question yourself why.