Ta-Nehisi Coates on Trump’s ‘Long History of Racism’

Many Americans were outraged when, in the wake of violent displays of white supremacy in Charlottesville, Va., President Trump failed to condemn white supremacy outright. But Ta-Nehisi Coates, author and national correspondent at The Atlantic, was not surprised by Trump’s weak response.

“I don’t know what people expected,” Coates tells Amy Goodman and Juan González in a new Democracy Now! interview. “The notion that Donald Trump … would come out and provide some sort of strong statement against white supremacy, I don’t know where that expectation comes from. He is who he said he was.”

In the interview, Coates delves into Trump’s “long history of racism … going back to the 1970s” and examines the “swagger and glory and the mythology of the old Confederacy” perpetuated by white supremacists today.

“We’re in a house of mirrors right now, where Jeff Sessions is the one who’s going to bring the white supremacists to justice—Jeff Sessions, who was denied a federal courtship, because, you know, it was thought that his proximity to the segregationists of Alabama was much too close. I have absolutely no faith, no more faith than one should have in foxes being appointed to guard the hen house,” Coates argues. “We elected a president who openly courted and openly activated the forces of white supremacy in this country in order to become president. We now have to live with the consequences of that. And I just—I don’t see much changing, certainly not in the next four years. I expect more of this, not less.”

Watch the interview in the player above, and find the full transcript on Democracy Now!

–Posted by Emma Niles.