Donald Trump is not America's first racist president, but hopefully he'll be our last

It was amusing at the start of the great racist tweet controversy to hear the media asking, “Is President Donald Trump a racist?” We are well beyond such questions.

“I am the least racist person you have ever met,” he has said on numerous occasions. If you were living solo on a deserted island and he showed up, that might be true, but for everyone else, it’s just another one of his delusional claims. In fact, I have met the president myself, and he’s off by one word. He is not the least racist person I’ve ever met — he is the most.

Trump supporters reading this will probably get upset and melt like snowflakes.Yet since October 1973, when Richard Nixon’s Justice Department sued Trump and his father Fred for barring blacks from their apartment buildings, it has been known that the president is a racist — and a congenital one at that.

Trump racism goes back decades

The least racist person you have ever met? You don’t know the history of the Central Park Five (Trump called for the death penalty for the accused teens), or the history of blacks who worked at his casinos (fine paid for discrimination, and much more) in Atlantic City.

The least racist person you have ever met? “Laziness is a trait in blacks. It really is, I believe that. It’s not anything they can control,” he said in a 1997 Playboy interview.

The least racist person you have ever met? Mexicans? “they’re rapists.” White supremacists waving swastikas in Charlottesville? “very fine people on both sides.” On and on and on.

Before we move on, here’s my favorite. Remember when Trump (you know, the least racist person you’ve ever met) said that Haitian immigrants “all have AIDS” and that many African nations were “s---hole countries?”

One country he has singled out is Nigeria; he said once Nigerians have seen the United States, they would never “go back to their huts.”

His base loves this stuff, but guess what? The joke’s on them. According to Trump’s own Census Bureau, Nigerian immigrants are far better educated than white Americans. For instance, 17% of Nigerians who are here have a master’s degree; just 8% of whites do. And 4% of Nigerians who are here have a Ph.D. Just 1% of whites do.

Holding these figures down are lesser educated white folks like Trump himself and his relatives. None of them have an advanced degree — though Tiffany Trump, a second-year law student at Georgetown, may be the first to earn one.

Racism from Andrew Johnson to FDR

Americans have survived racist presidents before. Woodrow Wilson, a southerner, opposed postwar Reconstruction because "the dominance of an ignorant and inferior race was justly dreaded." He opposed giving blacks the right to vote, claiming “it was a menace to society,” and as president he oversaw the re-segregation of the federal government. He lived in the White House a century ago.

Calvin Coolidge signed an immigration bill aimed at keeping out “the yellow peril” — i.e. Asians, along with Africans and Arabs. “America must be kept American,” he said in 1923.

Trump's tweets: Bullies told me to go back to my country. At first it silenced me, now it spurs me on.

And everyone knows that after Pearl Harbor was bombed, Franklin D. Roosevelt issued Executive Order 9066, leading to the forced relocation of 117,000 Japanese Americans from the West Coast to inland internment camps. FDR’s defenders pointed out that we had just been bombed by Japan and were at war.

But few know that in 1925, Roosevelt wrote that “Japanese immigrants are not capable of assimilation into the American population...Anyone who has traveled in the Far East knows that the mingling of Asiatic blood with European and American blood produces, in nine cases out of ten, the most unfortunate results.”

FDR led us through the Great Depression and World War II. He was one of our greatest presidents. Yet those words cannot be ignored.

Visions of racial superiority

There are other examples — Andrew Johnson, who succeeded Lincoln, was probably the worst of all — but you get the idea. American history is dotted with presidents who harbored visions of racial superiority.

But not in the modern era, at least not to the degree that we have seen with Trump. He went from bad to worse just the last few days with his attacks on "The Squad" -- Reps. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, D-N.Y., Ilhan Omar, D-,Minn., Ayanna Pressley D-Mass., and Rashida Tlaib, D-Mich., all young freshmen congresswomen of color. And then he doubled down Monday, saying they hate America?

Actually, Trump seems to hate America himself. After all, he has complained about several amendments to our Constitution. He has complained about our system of checks and balances, our judicial system, our free press, people who are different than him.

Why does he hate the things that make our country great? And how do the rest of us get beyond this hatred and ignorance?

Donald Trump is not our first racist president. Let us hope, however, that he will be our last.

Paul Brandus, founder and White House bureau chief of West Wing Reports, is the author of "Under This Roof: The White House and the Presidency" and is a member of USA TODAY's Board of Contributors. Follow him on Twitter: @WestWingReport.

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This article originally appeared on USA TODAY: Make Trump our last racist president. He hates what makes us great.