It is not a new accusation – and yet it sounds sharper, more personal, more unflinching than many before. Michael Wolff, long-time Trump observer and author of several bestselling books about the president, gave a remarkably candid insight into the thinking of the 47th president of the United States in a recent interview. According to Wolff, it is not merely political calculation but a deeply rooted conviction: Donald Trump believes the world is a better place without Black people - or at least without having to acknowledge their existence.
"Clearly, he has an issue with Black people," Wolff said. "To him, the world is better when Black people are not there - or when he does not have to notice them. When they are not part of what he sees as a zero-sum game between Black and white people." Wolff was not speaking in generalities, but from close personal observation. In Trump’s world, he added, the word "racist" has long lost its deterrent effect. It has become a kind of badge of honor - a marker of separation from a liberal discourse that Trump and his circle despise. The list of the president’s racist incidents is long and well documented. As early as 1973, the U.S. Department of Justice sued Trump and his father Fred for discriminatory housing practices against Black applicants. Later, he made a name for himself as one of the loudest proponents of the racially charged “birther” movement, which sought to deny Barack Obama the legitimacy of the presidency. His stance toward the so-called “Central Park Five” is equally notorious: five teenagers, mostly Black, were falsely accused of raping a white woman in 1989. Although they were fully exonerated in 2002, Trump still insists on their guilt. At the time, he took out a full-page newspaper ad calling for the return of the death penalty - without regret, without retraction.
Trump began his presidency with a speech in which he broadly labeled Mexicans as “rapists” and “criminals.” Shortly afterward, he downplayed the white nationalist rally in Charlottesville by stating there were “very fine people” on both sides. And in 2018, during a meeting in the Oval Office about immigration from Haiti and African nations, he referred to them simply as “shithole countries.”
For Michael Wolff, these statements are not the sum of isolated outbursts but the expression of a coherent worldview - one that is profoundly shaped by racism. Trump does not see Black people as part of a shared “we,” but as an opposing force. "He sees them as fundamentally different from white people," Wolff said. And he goes so far as to claim that the word "racist" no longer counts as an insult in Trump's circles, but as a kind of medal of honor. It signals strength - or what is considered strength in his camp: the deliberate violation of taboos, the rejection of any notion of equality.
This worldview is what makes Trump’s public statements so dangerous. It is not just about offensive rhetoric, but about a political project built on exclusion - culturally, linguistically, ideologically. When the president of the United States does not regard people as equals, it has consequences far beyond individual scandals. It shapes the language, the thinking, the laws of an entire country. Donald Trump often claims that he is “the least racist person anyone has ever interviewed.” But his biographers, his record - and his own words - tell a different story. And it is as clear as it is disturbing. The question is no longer whether Trump is racist - but how long a democratic system can endure the normalization of his thinking.
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