According to his longtime former “fixer” Michael Cohen, who has written a book about his experiences, Donald Trump once openly used a homophobic slur to describe a contestant on the first season of his reality show, The Apprentice. The contestant was Kwame Jackson, a gay black man who graduated from Harvard Business School and was one of the final two contestants in the first season. According to Cohen, Trump insisted to him that he wasn’t going to let the “black fag” when the season, so he went with Bill Rancic, instead. Rancic was eventually brought onboard to oversee the construction of Trump Tower Chicago.
Cohen describes the incident involving Trump’s derisive attitude towards Jackson in his new book, which is called Disloyal. (Cohen has very openly broken with the president at this point.) The excerpt in question reads as follows:
‘[In] September 2008, we were in Chicago for the “topping off” ceremony for The Trump International Hotel and Tower. Bill Rancic, who had won the first season of The Apprentice four years before, had been put in charge of the project. Trump reminisced to me about Rancic, who had been in a head-to-head with another contestant, Kwame Jackson. Kwame was not only a nice guy, but also a brilliant Harvard MBA graduate. Trump was explaining his back-and-forth about not picking Kwame. “There was no way I was going to let this black fag win,” he said to me.’
Jackson has actually previously confirmed that he “had heard that the president made such a comment,” according to a 2018 piece in Vanity Fair. It’s far from the first occasion on which Trump has been derisive towards marginalized communities — no matter his haughty, self-important proclamations of how much that he has supposedly done for black Americans, he has even been accused of freely using the N-word.
In office as president, Trump has more recently turned towards the thinly veiled racism of proclaiming that he will save the “suburbs” from an “invasion” of low-income housing. Marginalized communities like many black Americans are the ones most often associated wit low-income housing. Trump is engaging in thinly veiled, delusional race-baiting in his desperate push for re-election.
