Photo : Mark Wilson ( Getty )

I don’t mean to shock you. After all, here you were, minding your business, reading a blog and thinking about all the things you could eat for lunch (Burrito bowl? Salad, out of respect for the summer body that will get here...maybe in 2021? Steak-Umms?) or the places you could travel if you weren’t in an over-air-conditioned office. But instead, you’re here with me, clutching our collective pearls over the realization that Donald Trump doesn’t support reparations for slavery.



In an exclusive interview with t he Hill, Trump said: “I don’t see it happening.”



“I think it’s a very unusual thing,” Trump said about the possibility of the federal government pursuing monetary compensation or funding for the descendants of slaves. “You have a lot of — it’s been a very interesting debate. I don’t see it happening, no.”




Please, dear reader, revisit us in the land of the living. This is the man who can’t countenance a Harriet Tubman $20 bill , which would just coincidentally displace his beloved Andrew Jackson. A man who called for the death penalty for the Central Park Five and recently doubled down on his decision to do so. A man who once, according to John O’Donnell, the former president of Trump Plaza Hotel and Casino in Atlantic City, said about black accountants: “Black guys counting my money! I hate it. The only kind of people I want counting my money are short guys that wear yarmulkes every day. … I think that the guy is lazy. And it’s probably not his fault, because laziness is a trait in blacks. It really is, I believe that.”

This is the man who publicly pitched an Apprentice race war. And now, the guy who stoked the embers of a fledgling political base by being a bullhorn for birtherism can’t get behind reparations. Wild!




Joining Trump was another conservative white man accused multiple times of sexual misconduct (though, unlike the president, he has never been accused of rape), Bill O’Reilly. Unfortunately for everyone with access to Twitter, O’Reilly still tweets, and the former Fox News host shared his thoughts on reparations on Monday.



Interestingly enough, while calling the idea that the country was founded on white supremacy a “radical belief,” O’Reilly actually elucidated why the federal government, in particular, might owe the descendants of slaves some form of compensation.




“It reinforces the radical belief that the United States was founded by racist white men who installed a system whereby white guys would run everything and blacks, women and others would be exploited,” O’Reilly wrote.


“It also suggests that personal responsibility does not count when the legacy of slavery dropped a curtain of oppression on the black race and there is no recovering from that. The radical left says our society remains unjust to this day, forget personal responsibility,” he continued.



Actually, Bill, and it truly does surprise me to say this: You right.