Republicans on the House Oversight Committee invited a black federal employee to appear in Michael Cohen’s hearing Wednesday, to make the point that President Donald Trump could not possibly be racist, as Cohen has alleged.
In his opening statements, Cohen said he heard Trump call black people stupid, and claimed the president once asked if any country run by a black person was not a “shithole.” Barack Obama was president at the time, according to Cohen.
Lynne Patton, a Trump appointee in the Department of Housing and Urban Development, stood behind Rep. Mark Meadows (R-NC), who spoke for her.
“She says as a daughter of a man born in Birmingham, Alabama that there is no way that she would work for an individual who was a racist,” Meadows said, referring to Patton.
Cohen pointed out that he was the son of a Holocaust survivor and probably shouldn’t have been working for the president, either.
“Ask Miss Patton how many people who are black executives at the Trump Organization […] The answer is zero,” Cohen added.
Cohen’s testimony is far from the first time Trump has been accused of racism. He first appeared in The New York Times in 1973, for instance, because the Justice Department sued him and his father for discriminating against black New Yorkers in his apartment buildings.
A 1991 book by the former president of Trump Plaza Hotel and Casino in Atlantic City also quoted Trump saying, “Black guys counting my money! I hate it. The only kind of people I want counting my money are short guys that wear yarmulkes every day.”
Trump for years also pushed the false claim that President Barack Obama was born in Kenya, and thus ineligible to be president.
When Trump announced he himself would be running, he began his campaign with a litany of racist remarks; he said he wanted to ban all Muslims from entering the country, and he called Mexicans rapists and drug smugglers.
After taking office, he also said a Mexican-American judge was incapable of being impartial because of his race.
After he became president, Trump pushed to build a wall to keep immigrants out of the country, and tried to establish a ban on Muslim immigration. He sympathized with white supremacists, even after one killed a woman during a violent white nationalist rally in Charlottesville, Virginia. He mockingly called a sitting member of Congress “Pocahontas” and asked a black reporter in the White House press corps whether she was friends with the Congressional Black Caucus and might introduce them.
In January 2018, Trump reportedly said all Haitian immigrants have AIDS, and said immigrants from Nigeria would never go back to their “huts.” The White House denied the president made those statements. The president also reportedly said immigrants from Africa were coming from “shithole countries” and that the United States should take more immigrants from Norway. The White House denied those comments as well, but several senators present at the time later confirmed the statements.
Trump, meanwhile, has claimed he is “the least racist person.”
Patton, in her appearance Wednesday, was not asked about or given a chance to address the president’s long history of problematic public statements and actions.