So here we go! President Trump! Trump has has openly demonstrated racism and bigotry to the cheers and applause of millions of screaming cult-esque followers. Yeah so he lost the popular by what will be over 1 million votes when California is fully counted. But who cares right? I mean the antiquated 1700’s Electoral College system vote went his way right! So here we go with a President who does NOT even represent the majority of the country. And he did it selling White Nationalism! Wow!
So does this mean America about to elect the most racist bigoted president in U.S. history? And what does this say about the U.S.A. and the kind of country it has become? Will a President Trump be more racist than his Top 5 winners of the dubious award that have come before him?
I mean Trump failed to disavow the Ku Klux Klan and he hired proud White Supremacists Steven Bannon and Jeff Sessions for his team but he’ll have you know he is not racist. In fact, he claims to be “the least racist person that you have ever met,” and last summer he pulled out the old standby about not having a racist bone in his body.
But he hasn’t given us any reason to believe him. In fact, despite Trump’s protests to the contrary, he has a long storied and documented history of saying and doing racist things. It’s not really surprising that he’s won the support and praise of all the country’s white supremacists.
We have witnessed Trump attacking Muslim Gold Star parents and claimed a federal judge born in Indiana was biased because “he’s a Mexican”.
In fact, the Justice Department sued his company ― twice ― for not renting to black people. Discrimination against black people has been a pattern in his career.
He has refused to condemn the white supremacists who are campaigning for him and, in an effort to delegitimize, spent years telling us President Obama was NOT born in the United States with a wink wink dog whistle to bigotry and racism.
He consistently treats racial groups as monoliths. He trashed Native Americans, too!
Disgustingly, he encouraged the mob justice that resulted in the wrongful imprisonment of the Central Park Five. He condoned the beating of a Black Lives Matter protester. He called supporters who beat up a homeless Latino man “passionate”. And he stereotyped Jews and shared an anti-Semitic meme created by white supremacists. He treats African-American supporters as tokens to dispel the idea he is racist. And the list goes on and on and on!
So here we go…we got Racist President Trump! Where does this proud list of Trump accomplishments rate him against the Top 5 in our history? Will Trump be the biggest winner here and be our # 1 racist bigoted president when its’ all said and done? Can he out duel Andrew Jackon’s Trail of Tears and go full Nazi and put Muslim Americans in concentration camps? Or does he have much more to accomplish to get higher on this list? What say you?
First check out the notorious list below. Then below the article and provide your comments.
TOP 5 RACIST PRESIDENTS OF ALL-TIME
5. Thomas Jefferson ~ 3rd President (1801-1809)
By the time President Jefferson took office in 1801, his “all Men are created equal” was fast becoming a distant memory in the new nation’s racial politics. President Jefferson had emerged as the preeminent American authority on Black inferiority. His racist ideas (“The blacks…are inferior to the whites in the endowments both of body and mind”) in his perennially best-selling Notes on the State of Virginia (1787) were that impactful. His Notes were useful for powerful Americans rationalizing slavery after the American Revolution. In the book, Jefferson also offered the most popular race relations solution of the 19th century: the freeing, “civilizing,” and colonizing of all Blacks back to “barbaric” Africa.
President Jefferson should be applauded for pushing Congress to pass the Slave Trade Act in 1807. Then again, a new evil replaced the old. The measure closed the door on the nation’s legal participation in the international slave trade in 1808, and flung open the door on the domestic slave trade. Large slaveholders like President Jefferson supported this law since it increased the demand and value of their captives. They started deliberately “breeding” enslaved Africans to supply the demand of planters rushing into the Louisiana territory, which President Jefferson purchased from Napoleon in 1803. “I consider a woman who brings a child every two years as more profitable than the best man on the farm,” Jefferson explained to a friend on June 30, 1820.
4. James Monroe ~ 5th President (1817-1825)
If Jefferson was the brainchild of the colonization movement, then President Monroe was its pioneering initiator. Weeks before he was elected, candidate Monroe watched and supported the formation of the American Colonization Society. Presiding over the first meeting, House Speaker Henry Clay tasked the organization with ridding “our country of a useless and pernicious, if not dangerous” population, and redeeming Africa “from ignorance and barbarism.” By 1821, President Monroe had seized a strip of coastal West African land. This first American colony in Africa was later named “Liberia,” and its capital was named “Monrovia.”
But it was another namesake that really thrust President Monroe onto this list. “We…declare that we should consider any attempt on their part to extend their system to any portions of this hemisphere as dangerous to our peace and safety.” Thus said President Monroe during his seventh annual message to Congress in 1923. Several U.S. presidents used this “Monroe Doctrine” as a rationalizing cord for U.S. intervention into sovereign Latin American states, including the toppling of governments unfriendly to U.S. interests. This Monroe Doctrine was as racist and devastating to Latin American communities abroad as the doctrine of Manifest Destiny was to indigenous communities at home. In 2013, President Obama’s Secretary of State John Kerry declared to the Organization of American States the “era of the Monroe Doctrine is over.”
3. Ronald Wilson Reagan ~ 40th President (1981-1989)
The arbiter of the “welfare queen” myth who evoked the old slaveholder and segregationist mantra of “states’ rights” perfected President Richard Nixon’s infamous “southern strategy” that actually worked nationally. President Reagan attracted voters through racially coded appeals that allowed them to avoid admitting they were attracted by the racist appeals. He stood at the head of a reactionary movement that undid some of the material gains of civil rights and Black power activists. During President Reagan’s first year in office, the median income of Black families declined by 5.2 percent and the number of poor Americans, who were disproportionately Black, increased by 2.2. million—a sign of things to come under Reaganomics. Then in 1982, President Reagan announced his War on Drugs at an inauspicious time: when drug use was declining. “We must mobilize all our forces to stop the flow of drugs into this country,” Reagan said.
President Reagan surely did not mobilize any of his forces to stop the CIA-back Contra rebels of Nicaragua from smuggling cocaine into the country to fund their operations. But he surely did mobilize his forces to draw media attention to their spreading of crack cocaine in 1985. The media blitz handed his slumbering War on Drugs an intense media high in 1986. That fall, he signed “with great pleasure” the Anti-Drug Abuse Act, which established minimum sentencing for drug crimes and led to the mass incarceration of Black and Brown drug offenders over the next few decades. Like his campaign strategies, President Reagan took President Nixon’s racist drug war to a new level, and the mass incarceration of Black and Brown bodies accelerated under the Bush (times two) and Clinton administrations, especially after Clinton’s 1994 crime bill. White drug offenders, consuming and dealing drugs at similar or greater rates, remained disproportionately free. Reagan stands on this list as the representative of all these mass incarcerating presidents in the late 20th century.
2. Andrew Jackson ~ 7th President (1829-1837)
Yes, the president the U.S. Treasury is planning on putting on the back of Harriett Tubman is the second most racist president of all-time. Ironically, he attracted the same demographic groups (less educated, less affluent White men) that Trump is attracting these days.
Jackson stepped into the U.S. presidency as a wealthy Tennessee enslaver and military general who had founded and spearheaded the Democratic Party. Jacksonian Democrats, as historians call them, amassed a winning coalition of southern enslavers, White working people, and recent European immigrants who regularly rioted against abolitionists, indigenous and Black communities, and civil rights activists before and after the Civil War. When the mass mailings of antislavery tracts captured national attention in 1835, President Jackson called on Congress to pass a law prohibiting “under severe penalties, the circulation…of incendiary publications.” And the following year Jackson and his supporters instituted the infamous “gag rule” that effectively tabled all the anti-slavery petitions rushing into Congress.
And yet, it was his Indian removal policies that were the most devastating of all on the lives of Native Americans (and African Americans). Beginning with the Indian Removal Act of 1830, President Jackson forced several Native Americans nations to relocate from their ancestral homelands in the Southeastern United States to areas west of the Mississippi River—all to make way for those enslaved Africans being forcibly hauled into the Deep South. President Jackson help forge this trail of Native American tears out of the Deep South, and this trail of African tears into the Deep South.
1. Andrew Johnson ~ 17th President (1865-1869)
This Democrat from Tennessee was sworn into the presidency after John Wilkes Booth assassinated Abraham Lincoln days after the Civil War ended. When President Johnson issued his Reconstruction proclamations about a month later on May 29, 1865, he deflated the high hopes of civil rights activists. President Johnson offered amnesty, property rights, and voting rights to all but the highest Confederate officials (most of whom he pardoned a year later). He later ordered the return of land to pardoned Confederates, null and voided those wartime orders that granted Blacks forty acres and a mule, and removed many of the Black troops from the South.
Feeling empowered by President Johnson, Confederates instituted a series of discriminatory Black codes at the constitutional conventions that reformulated southern states in the summer and fall of 1865. The immediate postwar South became the spitting image of the prewar South in everything but name—as the law replaced the master. These racist policies caused a postwar, war, since an untold number of Black people lost their lives resisting them.
Congress stepped up to unravel the reemergence of the southern Confederacy in everything but name. But President Johnson vetoed the Freedmen’s Bureau Bill and Civil Rights Bill of 1866, compelling Congress to pass them over his veto. President Johnson also opposed the 14th and 15th Amendments to the U.S. constitution, and in 1868 became the first American president to be impeached by the House of Representatives. He remained in office, after being acquitted in the Senate by one vote. But President Johnson has never been acquitted in the annals of history. He still makes those lists on the worst presidents of all-time. He tops this list as the most racist president of all time.
About Johnny Punish: Former punk rock lead singer from 90s underground punk band Twisted Nixon (1996-2002), Punish is now pushing his artistic boundaries into the 21st century creating diverse music with a social justice activism that matters.
Friends label Punish a global social justice warrior, eco-activist, socially responsible businessman, and syndicated writer and broadcaster. He produces the irreverent political music podcast The Johnny Punish Show for VeteransTodayLive.com. In addition, Punish has penned over 300 articles on freedom, liberty, and justice around the world writing opt-eds for VeteransToday.com and other truth telling web sites.
Since 2000, Punish has delivered his global message from his self built eco-earthbag home studio dome on a dirt road with chickens. He lives relatively free in an unfree world pledging allegiance to the earth and all the human beings. To share the positive energy, Punish offers his 50 plus song very personal record trilogy The Strange Story of Johnny Punish, Volumes 1,2, and 3. (2000-2016). It is available now on on Itunes, Amazon.com, bandcamp.com and all digital platforms.
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