Klansman-in-Chief Donald Trump’s latest racist rant, his characterization of Haiti, El Salvador, and most or all of Africa as “shithole countries,” has been treated by the capitalist bosses’ media as an extraordinary event—“the lowest ebb of a presidency defined by a series of low ebbs and defining of the presidency downward” (cnn.com, 1/12). Former CIA Director and torture defender John Brennan tweeted that “Lady Liberty, our founding fathers, and generations of right-thinking Americans are all weeping tonight.” Former Haitian President Laurent Lamothe declared that the world had witnessed “a new low today….never seen before in the recent history of the U.S. by any President!”
In reality, history—recent and otherwise—tells a different story. The United States was born out of the genocide of native populations. Its wealth was created through the mass murder and enslavement of Black people from Africa. Its rulers have thrived from super-profits generated by imperialism and racism in the U.S. and around the world. Without racism, capitalism couldn’t effectively exploit, oppress, and divide the working class. Without racism, capitalism could not survive.
As CEO of the capitalist ruling class, the U.S. president both implements and rallies support for the bosses’ racist policies—it’s part of the job description. Trump is crude, vile, cartoonishly ignorant, and exceptionally transparent in his spewing of racist ideas. But the content of that ideology isn’t exceptional at all; it’s strictly business as usual. From the Founding Fathers through Barack Obama, every U.S. president has shared Trump’s ruling-class loyalties and his commitment to racism as the bosses’ essential weapon. Here are some examples, in their own words:
George Washington (U.S. president from 1789-1797): Indians and wolves are both beasts of prey, tho’ they differ in shape.
One of eight presidents to hold slaves while serving in the Oval Office, Washington owned 300 human beings at his plantation in Mount Vernon, Virginia. He promoted the U.S. rulers’ rationale for the genocide of the indigenous, and in particular for extermination of the Iroquois, paving the way for the early expansion of U.S. empire.
Thomas Jefferson (1801-1809): [I]n memory they are equal to the whites; in reason much inferior…and that in imagination they are dull, tasteless, and anomalous….I advance it therefore as a suspicion only, that the blacks, whether originally a distinct race, or made distinct by time and circumstances, are inferior to the whites in the endowments both of body and mind (“Notes on the State of Virginia,” 1785).
The author of the Declaration of Independence held more than 600 Black people captive over his lifetime. DNA testing shows that he raped the “mixed-race” adolescent Sally Hemings, who bore him six children (Atlanta Black Star, 2/25/17).
Abraham Lincoln (1861-1865): There is a natural disgust in the minds of nearly all white people to the idea of indiscriminate amalgamation of the white and black races ... A separation of the races is the only perfect preventive of amalgamation, but as an immediate separation is impossible, the next best thing is to keep them apart where they are not already together (speech in Springfield, Illinois, June 26, 1857).
Convinced that Black people could never live on a basis of “equality with the white race,” the Great Emancipator campaigned relentlessly for the “colonization” of freed slaves to Central America and the Caribbean. In December 1862, the day before Lincoln signed the Emancipation Proclamation, he met with a contractor to finalize plans to move 5,000 “colonists” to an uninhabited island off the cost of Haiti. After the first group of settlers was decimated by smallpox, and the survivors revolted, Lincoln’s ethnic cleansing project was abandoned (New York Times, 4/12/13).
Theodore Roosevelt (1901-1909): The problem is … that the backward race [Black people] be trained so that it may enter into the possession of true freedom while the forward race [white people] is enabled to preserve unharmed the high civilization wrought out by its forefathers…. or to confer the priceless boons of freedom, industrial efficiency, political capacity, and domestic morality (speech to the New York City Republican Club, February 13, 1905.)
Rivaling Trump’s gutter racism toward Muslims and Mexican workers, among others, this “progressive” Republican also said: “I don’t go so far as to think that the only good Indians are dead Indians, but I believe nine out of ten are, and I shouldn’t like to inquire too closely into the case of the tenth” (smithsonianmag.com, 11/9/12).
Franklin D. Roosevelt (1933-1945): Anyone who has traveled to the Far East knows that the mingling of Asiatic blood with European or American blood produces, in nine cases out of ten, the most unfortunate results (Macon Daily Telegraph, 1925).
In 1942, this liberal icon ordered the imprisonment of more than 100,000 U.S. residents of Japanese descent, most of them U.S. citizens, into hellhole concentration camps. He appointed Hugo Black, a former lawyer for the Ku Klux Klan, to the U.S. Supreme Court. A notorious anti-Jewish racist, Roosevelt collaborated in Hitler’s genocidal “Final Solution” by actively blocking Jewish immigration from Germany and other Axis-dominated countries, and by refusing to bomb the railway routes to Auschwitz and other death camps.
Lyndon B. Johnson (1963-1969): These Negroes, they’re getting pretty uppity these days and that’s a problem for us since they’ve got something now they never had before, the political pull to back up their uppityness. Now we’ve got to do something about this, we’ve got to give them a little something, just enough to quiet them down, not enough to make a difference (Lyndon Johnson: Master of the Senate, by Robert A. Caro).
Widely hailed for pushing through the Civil Rights Act of 1964, Johnson was famous for his habitual use of the N-word and proudly voted against an anti-lynching bill in 1948. According to biographer Caro, he spent the late 1940s railing against the “hordes of barbaric yellow dwarves” in East Asia.
Bill Clinton (1993-2001): A few years ago, this guy [Barack Obama] would have been getting us coffee (remark to Ted Kennedy in Game Change, 2008, by John Heileman and Mark Helpurin.)
Hillary Clinton: But we also have to have an organized effort against gangs….They are often the kinds of kids that are called superpredators—no conscience, no empathy. We can talk about why they ended up that way, but first, we have to bring them to heel (1996 speech in New Hampshire).
This husband-and-wife team beat the drum for the 1994 Violent Crime Control and Law Enforcement Act, which directly led to the mass incarceration of generations of Black and Latin youth. They’re also responsible for the 1996 reform “to end welfare as we know it,” cataclysmic legislation that played to racist stereotypes, shredded the federal safety net, and doubled extreme poverty in the U.S. over the following 15 years (thenation.com, 2/10/16).
Barack Obama (2009-2017): Too many fathers are M.I.A., too many fathers are AWOL, missing from too many lives and too many homes. They have abandoned their responsibilities, acting like boys instead of men. And the foundations of our families are weaker because of it….You and I know how true this is in the African-American community (Father’s Day speech at the Apostolic Church of God on Chicago’s South Side, New York Times, 6/16/08.)
Michelle Obama: But today, more than 150 years after the Emancipation Proclamation, more than 50 years after the end of “separate but equal,” when it comes to getting an education, too many of our young people just can’t be bothered. Today, instead of walking miles every day to school, they’re sitting on couches for hours playing video games, watching TV. Instead of dreaming to be a teacher or a lawyer or a business leader, they’re fantasizing about being a baller or a rapper (commencement address at Bowie State University, a predominantly Black college in Maryland, 5/17/13).
As the first Black U.S. president, Barack Obama was especially useful to the bosses for running their old con game of blaming the victims of capitalism and racism. Even as Obama lectured Black workers to stop making “excuses” for their problems, he was bailing out the big banks while ignoring and devastating Black homeowners in the housing foreclosure crisis. Michelle Obama’s denigration of Black youth is especially despicable in an era when public schools are more segregated than they were in the late 1960s, with racist inequalities in resources growing larger by the year.
There’s a word for the Obamas’ scapegoating. It’s the same term the bosses’ media now widely applies to Trump, whose crime—in the rulers’ eyes—is to be too obvious about what their system is really about. The word is racist. And Trump is far from the first U.S. president to fit the description—and he won’t be the last.
