Despite President Donald Trump‘s claims he’s “never used racist remarks,” a man who’s known and worked alongside him for years says that’s simply untrue.
Jack O’Donnell, former president of the Trump Plaza Hotel & Casino in Atlantic City, New Jersey, penned an op-ed for POLITCO Magazine on Wednesday that blew massive holes in the president’s repeated denials of ever using disparaging, racist rhetoric to describe racial minorities.
Three former colleagues of President Donald Trump have accused the mogul of using racist language against African-Americans and other minorities. (Photo by Dominick Reuter / Reuters)
“I know the real Trump better than most,” O’Donnell wrote in the column. “For 3½ years, I worked in almost daily contact with him at the highest levels of the Atlantic City, N.J. casino empire over which he once held sway. I saw him treat Black people and minorities as inferior. I heard him say vulgar, bigoted things and I rebuked him for them. But he did not quit.”
During his time at the casino, O’Donnell said the then-real estate mogul would voice his annoyance when he believed there were too many Black people there gambling.
“I recall one busy Saturday night, walking the casino floor with him, when he saw what he considered an inordinate number of black customers,” the ex-casino boss said. “‘It’s looking a little dark in here,’ he calmly stated. It was his way of telling me to limit our charter bus programs in urban neighborhoods.”
O’Donnell said he ignored Trump, however, and continued to run the business in the best interest of his boss, as well as the casino’s stakeholders and employees.
He continued: “[Trump’s] prejudices did not stop at the color of one’s skin. Everyone was subject to judgment. It could be their ethnicity, their gender, or their religion. It could be their social ‘caste.’ ”
O’Donnell recalled Trump’s response to the Justice Department forcing him to integrate his rental housing in New York City in the ’70’, during which the future POTUS opined, “Blacks don’t want to live with whites, so why isn’t it OK for whites to not want to live with blacks?” There was also a time O’Donnell said Trump flew into a rage over a limo driver who arrived wearing clothes that made him look like a “f—–g Puerto Rican,” tarnishing his image.
The bombshell claims come just one week after Trump’s former lawyer and “fixer” Michael Cohen also accused the president of using racist language. Cohen, who pleaded guilty to fraud and campaign finance violations earlier this year, told Vanity Fair he could recall four times where Trump made denigrating remarks about African-Americans, including one instance where the president argued “Blacks are too stupid to vote for me.”
“‘Name one country run by a black person that’s not a s***hole,'”Cohen claimed Trump remarked after the death of South African leader and activist Nelson Mandela.
Ousted White House aide Omarosa Manigualt-Newman has made similar claims and alleged there’s a tape of Trump using the N-word on the set of NBC’s “The Apprentice.”
