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Of course, he’s a racist, if you judge Trump by his actions.

His defenders (no low too low for them either) insist he is not a racist person, but his actions say otherwise and always have. They’ve been telling us who he is his entire life.

In 1973 he and his father were sued by the Justice Department for racial discrimination because they refused to rent apartments in a NY development to African-Americans. Trump’s excuse was it was just business. In 1989 he told NBC news that he wished he was black because “a black” has the advantage in America. In 2015 he promoted the “birther lie” that President Obama was not born in America. He began his 2016 presidential campaign disparaging all immigrants as “criminals and rapists.”

More? He accused the judge in the Trump University fraud case of bias because of his Mexican heritage. In 2017 he said all Haitians have Aids and later commented that he wanted less immigration from Haiti and Africa and more from Norway. In 2018 he said a caravan of murderers and rapist were traveling through Mexico headed to the U.S. In 2019 he described white nationalists who caused violence in Charlottesville as “very nice people” and further said “there were good people on both sides” of what happened.

I could go on, but his latest racist action says it all. As America’s sitting President he sent out a racist meme of our nation’s first black President and First Lady depicting them as apes. It was disgusting and appalling, leaving no doubt to honest people that if Trump’s action expose his racial attitude, he can rightly be judged as a racist president.

You would have thought that this would have been the line he crossed that Republican leaders in Congress would say enough is enough. It wasn’t.

As of this writing, my count is that only 14 out of 54 Republican Senators criticized Trump racist meme of former President and First Lady Obama and 4 out of 218 Republican House members. Neither Senator Republican Majority Leader John Thune nor Republican House Speaker Mike Johnson have said anything.

It’s pretty clear where Trump and the overwhelming majority of congressional Republicans stand on race. The best you can infer from their silence is that if they are not racist, their commitment to racial justice is so shallow that minority Americans cannot count on them to stand firmly with them when they need it.

That’s the message from Trump and Republicans during Black History this very month of 2026.

This story suggests that we have made no progress on racial justice as a nation since the days when racism was a dominant undercurrent in American life, especially in the South, and discrimination was widely practiced in industry, education, business, churches, sports, school funding, and government itself.

Actually, though, we have made progress. There’s much more to do, but America today is a better country than we were when Trump was growing up. I know because I grew up at the same time he did.

It was an ugly America, to be honest about it, an America where privilege dominated the social, political, economic, and religious life of our nation. It was an America where businesses and corporations, colleges and universities, politics, even churches, were predominantly white and male.

It was an America where racial and economic and social inequality was dominant, where homosexuality was believed to be a mental illness, male promiscuity was acceptable as long as you didn’t get caught, and a majority of churches stood on the wrong side of every major social and human rights issue our nation faced.

What is more, “the ugly American” was a common image other nations had of us, a rich and militarily powerful nation that threw its weight around the world as if we didn’t need any friends.

In short, the old America Trump grew up in was a nation in which being white, male, and wealthy meant you had power and privilege closed to women, minorities, and the poor, whatever your skin color. Diversity was barely tolerated, equality was considered a threat to privilege, laws were made for those who didn’t have the money to buy themselves out of trouble, and America was feared, but hardly admired by peoples around the world.

That’s the America Trump wants to go back to because emotionally and mentally he still lives there, which is why he resents President Obama so much. Obama’s success and the widespread respect Americans have for him remind Trump that the white privilege America he grew up in is permanently gone. Trump showed how threatened he is by that fact when he posted the raw racist meme that shocked the conscience of every American who prefers today’s America over what we used to be.

Going back to old America is also why Trump brought his revenge politics to Minnesota. He wanted to prove to his base voters that he would get rid of brown and black immigrants who are destroying the way of life white people used to have.

But he made a big mistake. Minnesota is a blue state for a reason. We like the America of today more than yesterday’s America. We like our diverse and open neighborhoods. We believe in being good neighbors without judging others by the color of their skin or what their national origin might be. That’s why when you attack our immigrant neighbors, all of us feel attacked.

Trump didn’t anticipate that because he doesn’t understand it. He has no neighbors he would help. He has no one he would defend if hurt or attacked. It’s all about himself.

Minnesotans are not nearly as dumb as Trump is, but he’s too dumb to realize it. We don’t like criminals anymore than other people, but we have sense enough to know that a neighbor who’s been going to work every day for ten years and is a nice, friendly guy is not a threat to us or anyone else.

So we said NO to his fascist ICE police force in the way citizens in a democracy can say it. By the thousands we used our 1st Amendment right to protest on behalf of our neighbors who had no voice. In addition, we began buying groceries for those families whose mothers and fathers are afraid of going to work.

And we will keep protesting for and helping our neighbors because we know that a Trump who will come after them is a Trump who might one day come after us. And now millions across the nation are standing up to him with us, at last count some 9 million Americans, making it the largest protest in our history.

We got into this fight because we had no choice. We are going to stay in it because we believe Trump must go. The struggle has become much bigger than what is happening in the streets of Minneapolis. It is about refusing to go back to an old America we never want to live in again.

The Kamala Harris campaign got it right when it repeated the mantra, “We’re not going back.”We’re not because we have left that old America behind and we’re moving forward into a better America than we once were.

If we have to we will leave Trump and all his MAGA Republicans behind. If they can keep trying to take us back, they won’t succeed. Minnesotans and Americans all around the nation are proving that we have more fight in us than they have in them.

The reason we do is because, unlike them, our patriotism unites all of us instead of only some of us, a patriotism that means we meant it when by the fact of our citizenship we pledged to defend America and our way of life against all enemies foreign or domestic.

If that includes Trump and MAGA Republicans, so be it, because we are not going back.