President Trump has a long history of public racism, but according to Michael Cohen, he's even more openly bigoted behind the scenes.

The president’s former personal lawyer and fixer, who plead guilty last summer to charges of campaign finance violations and fraud, is testifying before the House Oversight Committee on Wednesday. Copies of Cohen's planned statements to Congress were given to the press Tuesday night, and contained numerous explosive allegations—among them, that Trump is loudly racist.

"The country has seen Mr. Trump court white supremacists and bigots," says Cohen in the statement. "In private, he is even worse."

He once asked me if I could name a country run by a black person that wasn't a "shithole." This was when Barack Obama was President of the United States.



While we were once driving through a struggling neighborhood in Chicago, he commented that only black people could live that way. And, he told me that black people would never vote for him because they were too stupid.

While Cohen is a known liar, his allegations about Trump's racism are in keeping with a pattern of bigotry from the president that spans decades. As president, Trump has largely pursued a political agenda of racism towards Latin Americans and Muslims, he also has a long history of bigotry towards African-Americans.

Michael Cohen is testifying before Congress on Wednesday. Getty Images

In the 1970s, Trump’s real estate company company discriminated against black potential renters. (According to The New York Times, one superintendent said that he had been instructed to note applications from black apartment seekers with “C,” for colored.) In the ‘90s, he took out full-page ads in New York newspapers advocating for the death penalty for five black and Latino teens accused of raping a white woman. Even in 2016, he insisted they were guilty—though they’d been exonerated more than a decade earlier.

Trump built his 2016 campaign on the "birther" conspiracy theory, insisting that President Obama was born in Kenya, and throughout his presidency has missed no opportunity to demean the intelligence of his black critics. Multiple sources told The Times in 2017 that Trump had said immigrants from Nigeria live in huts and that Haitians “all have aids.”

Publicly, Trump has attempted to push the narrative that he is a friend to black people, often overstating the African-American employment rate under his presidency and citing questionable polling data concerning his popularity among his black constituents.

Gabrielle Bruney Gabrielle Bruney is a writer and editor for Esquire, where she focuses on politics and culture.

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