His chief of staff had to correct him.
Donald Trump allegedly made a racist assumption about a group of racially diverse congressional staff members during a White House reception early in his presidency.
According to a Rolling Stone advance copy of New York Times reporter Maggie Haberman’s book, Confidence Man, Trump assumed the staffers were waiters and told them to get some food.
Reince Priebus, the White House chief of staff at the time, told Trump they were top congressional aides before going to find the actual waiters for him, according to the magazine.
Trump had a history of racist, sexist, and xenophobic behavior long before he ran for president, which he carried with him to the White House. He was also a leading proponent of the racist “birther” conspiracy theory, which claimed that then-President Barack Obama was a secret Muslim who was not born in America.
According to Confidence Man, when Trump moved into the White House after Obama, he told a visitor that he had the bathrooms remodeled.
“You understand what I’m talking about,” he told the guest, who interpreted that “to mean Trump did not want to use the same bathroom as his Black predecessor.”
In January 2017, a newly inaugurated President Donald Trump hosted a White House reception to meet with top congressional leaders. Hors d’oeuvres were served. According to a new book, the new president turned to a row of racially diverse Democratic staffers and asked them to retrieve the canapes.
“Why don’t you get” the food, Trump told staffers for Sen. Chuck Schumer, Rep. Nancy Pelosi, and others, according to New York Times reporter Maggie Haberman’s new book, Confidence Man.
The book details Trump’s long-term relationship with Kara Young, a model with a Black mother and a white father. Soon after meeting Young’s parents, Trump joked that she inherited her mother’s beauty and her father’s intelligence “from the white side.”
Trump laughed at himself. Young, on the other hand, did not and, according to the book, expressed her displeasure.
The guest, Haberman writes, “interpreted [the remark] to mean Trump did not want to use the same bathroom as his Black predecessor.”
