Black people, Donald Trump believes, are pitted against whites in a zero-sum game, according to the president’s biographer in an interview with “The Daily Beast” podcast.
“Clearly, he has some issue with Black people,” said Michael Wolff, who has written two books on Trump, “All or Nothing: How Trump Recaptured America” and “Fire and Fury: Inside the Trump White House.” “The world is a better place to him without Black people, or without having to be aware of Black people.”
The validity of Wolff’s insights into the president’s psyche is up for debate. For the latter book, published in 2018, the controversial author said he spent three hours interviewing him. Trump claimed to have given the author “zero access” to the White House.
“I never spoke to him for the book,” Trump said. “Full of lies, misrepresentations and sources that don’t exist.”
Trump’s views on race have always been complicated. While few may believe his 2020 claim that he is “the least racist person there is anywhere in the world,” Trump received more Black votes in 2024 than any Republican in 48 years.
“Trump certainly regards Black people as profoundly different from white people,” Wolff told the Daily Beast. “I mean the word racist now becomes in the Trump world a kind of high praise, because it’s meant to suggest the liberal overreach and the liberals call anybody racist.”
Trump established his credibility with far-right conservatives when he pushed the scurrilous rumor that Barack Obama was not born in the U.S. The real estate developer claimed he sent investigators to Hawaii to find Obama’s birth certificate, which Obama eventually released.
In 2016, when he first ran for president, Trump routinely retweeted white supremacists and neo-Nazis who had endorsed him. Following the Unite the Right rally Charlottesville, Virginia, in 2017 in which a counter-protester was killed by a white supremacist who drove his car into a crowd, the president claimed there were “some very fine people” on “both sides,” drawing praise for “defending the truth” from white nationalist Richard Spencer.
He reportedly claimed immigrants who come to the U.S. from Haiti “all have AIDS” and warned that Nigerian refugees would never “go back to their huts” once they saw America. Trump expanded on those remarks by asking, at a bipartisan conference on immigration, “Why are we having all these people from sh-thole countries come here?” He suggested that the United States should take more people from predominantly white countries like Norway.
Echoing his claims about Obama, Trump suggested that Kamala Harris, who’s Black and South Asian, “doesn’t meet the requirements” to be Joe Biden’s running mate.
Race has played a significant role in Trump’s second-term agenda. He has gutted DEI (diversity, equity and inclusion) policies at public institutions and universities. With a majority of his supporters believing racism against white people is a bigger problem than racism against Black people, Trump has ordered the Department of Justice to focus its attention on anti-white bias.
The president has also pushed false claims of genocide against white farmers in South Africa. White Afrikaaners are the only refugees who have been granted asylum in the U.S. during Trump’s second term.
Allegations of Trump’s racism extend well before his foray into politics. In 1973, the Trump Management Corporation was sued by the Department of Justice for violating the Fair Housing Act after claims that it had refused to rent to Black tenants. Trump claimed the federal government was trying to force him to rent to welfare recipients.
And he continues to claim the Central Park Five, a group of mostly Black teenagers, raped a white jogger in 1989 even though they were all fully exonerated in 2002.
