re: #494 Charles Johnson

Trump doesn’t miss an opportunity to screw Native Americans again.

Trump has a history of screwing them too - particularly when he was still in the casino business (and he kept going bankrupt because he couldn’t deal with the competition). He fought to block Native American casinos being built in NY within 2 hour drive of Manhattan, because he was worried he’d hemorrhage business to them.

Donald Trump claimed that Indian reservations had fallen under mob control. He secretly paid for more than $1 million in ads that portrayed members of a tribe in Upstate New York as cocaine traffickers and career criminals. And he suggested in testimony and in media appearances that dark-skinned Native Americans in Connecticut were faking their ancestry.

“I think I might have more Indian blood than a lot of the so-called Indians that are trying to open up the reservations,” Trump said during a 1993 radio interview with shock jock Don Imus.

Trump’s harsh rhetoric on Native Americans was part of his aggressive war on the expanding Native American casino industry during the 1990s, which posed a threat to his gambling empire. The racially tinged remarks and broad-brush characterizations that Trump employed against Indian tribes for over a decade provided an early glimpse of the kind of incendiary language that he would use about racial and ethnic groups in the 2016 presidential campaign.

Lies. Smears. Bigotry. Same tactics, just now installed in the White House with power beyond his wildest imagination.