Just in case anyone believes I have been too harsh in my comments about Trump’s alleged viral infection, the picture above came to be known as the ‘Central Park 5,’ a group of teenage kids who were arrested in April, 1989, for supposedly raping nd brutally attacking a White, female jogger in Central Park. The five kids, all in their teens, were convicted and sentenced to between 5 and 15 years. In 2003, following a DNA match between the victim and an adult serial rapist and murderer, the remaining two defendants were set free.

Several weeks after the kids were arrested, a young real-estate developer named Donald Trump paid over $80,000 for all four major New York newspapers to run this ad:

This ad created a firestorm of publicity about the crime but it also vaulted Trump ono the top of the media heap where he has remained ever since. When New York City finally admitted that the wrong kids were ,locked up and reached an out-of-court settlement to compensate these young men for having lost more than a decade of their lives, Trump publicly denounced the city government for ‘caving in’ and paying out any money at all.

Now let’s move forward to a more recent time. And the time I am talking about is 2011, when Trump was mulling over a Presidential run and with the help of his dear buddy, Roger Stone, began to question whether Obama was born in the United States. For Trump, the ‘birther movement’ became a quick and clever way to see how people would react to a racist smear not just against a Black man, but against a Black man with a Muslim background as well.

Trump’s campaign worked so well that racist attacks on African-Americans and Muslims became a centerpiece of his 2016 campaign. Whenever his rallies got tired of chanting ‘lock her up!’ he could lead them in another favorite chant, ‘send them back!’

If you think I’m being at all unfair about Trump’s racism, here’s a published quote from the 2016 campaign:

I wish I were making up my characterization of Trump as a racist but I’m not. Not only has this guy been playing a public, racist card for more than 30 years, but he has consciously injected racism into the political narrative every chance he gets.

Trump started his attacks against the Central Park 5 just before Ed Koch left the Mayor’s office in New York and was replaced by a Black politician, David Dinkins, who served one term. He served only one term because his successor, Rudy Giuliani, ran the single most racist mayoralty campaign if all time. I was living in New York back then and I remember the degree to which Giuliani injected the most disgusting racist commentary into the 1993 campaign.

And now we are, more than 30 years after Trump first pretended that racist rhetoric has a rightful place in the American political debate, and he’s at it again. You think his refusal to condemn without qualification all supremacy movements and speech is just a ‘mistake?’ Some mistake.

I thought the most important and telling moment of Tuesday night’s debate was when Joe stated that Trump’s lack of response to the corona virus had resulted in 1 our of every 1,000 African-American men losing their lives, a toll which could possibly reach 1 in 500 by the end of the year. And Joe made this statement in response to something Trump said about how he’s always been a ‘friend’ of the Blacks.

Is it really fair to say that Trump did nothing about the virus because, like everyone else, he didn’t realize how serious it was? Or is it possible, maybe just maybe, he let the whole issue alone because the Pandemic first started hitting Black communities far beyond the infection rates being felt among Whites?

I don’t think that my question is all that unfair.