MSNBC anchor Lawrence O’Donnell on Tuesday declared former President Donald Trump the “most racist” occupant of the White House who didn’t own slaves, part of a strongly worded monologue that touched on the Justice Department’s recent—and decades-old—scrutiny of Trump and his family business.
O’Donnell called attention to how the department sued Trump Management in 1973 for discriminating against Black people while renting apartments in New York.
“For all of Donald Trump’s childhood, his father was a racist landlord that refused to rent apartments to people like Kamala Harris and her parents. Donald Trump, the most racist presidential nominee of a party who did not personally own slaves, grew up to join his father’s racist business,” the anchor of The Last Word said.
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“It led them both to be charged by the Justice Department with violating the civil rights of applicants for apartments by viciously discriminating against Black people,” O’Donnell continued, before delving into a superseding indictment filed Tuesday against Trump by a new grand jury in Washington, D.C. The development meant that he was effectively re-charged with the same offenses over his alleged involvement in the Jan. 6, 2021 insurrection and his efforts to overturn the 2020 election.
The shorter indictment, O’Donnell charged, was revised because the conservative-majority Supreme Court “decided to allow Trump to commit crimes he committed in the Oval Office on New Year’s Eve when the entire command structure of the Justice Department threatened to quit.”
“The Supreme Court ruled that any crime he conspires to commit in the Oval Office with appointed members of the executive Branch—any of those crimes are crimes that the Supreme Court believes the Founders wanted the president to get away with,” O’Donnell said. “The Republican Supreme Court is, of course, insanely wrong about that.”
The high court ruled in July that former presidents have some immunity from prosecution for “official acts.”
