Jonathan M. Katz is the author of The Big Truck That Went By: How the World Came to Save Haiti and Left Behind a Disaster. His next book, on the Marines who created America’s empire, will be published by St. Martin’s Press. He is currently the director of the Media & Journalism Initiative at the John Hope Franklin Humanities Institute at Duke University.

On Sunday night, Donald Trump strode onto a colonnaded porch of his exclusive Palm Beach golf resort and declared he is not a racist. “I am the least racist person you have ever interviewed,” the president bellowed at a press gaggle while House Majority Leader Kevin McCarthy stood blank-faced at his side. Trump was denying a string of recent reports about racist comments he has made in the Oval Office—calling Haiti, El Salvador and all 54 nations in Africa “shithole countries,” that immigrants from Nigeria all previously lived in huts, and that Haitians “all have AIDS.”

The White House, with the help of friendly Republican senators, has tied itself in knots to deny the president made these offensive remarks—though they have also defended them in substance, and Trump has reportedly bragged about his “shithole” comment to friends. There is also the question of whether anyone should believe anything this president says, ever. News outlets have stood by their accounts of a president who seems, for a man who claims not to have a racist bone in his body, oddly predisposed to make statements that even House Speaker Paul Ryan, on one occasion, has described as “the textbook definition” of racism.


Trump’s obsession with race, from his complaints about the heritage of a Hispanic-American judge to his false attacks on the Central Park Five, is too voluminous to list here. But the clearest example is the link that seems to exist in his mind between Haitian immigrants and AIDS. To understand why, we have to go back to the early 1980s, when Trump was a thirtysomething playboy businessman in New York City, just starting to make his mark on the national scene.

The first major mainstream story about what we know now as AIDS appeared in the New York Times in July 1981—concerning a rare form of cancer, Kaposi’s sarcoma, that was killing gay men in New York and San Francisco. The understated article quoted the U.S. Centers for Disease Control as saying that “there was no apparent danger to nonhomosexuals from contagion.” But soon after, the reports of strange and lethal infections started to rise. At first, some researchers called the condition “Gay-Related Immune Deficiency.” But as reports of nongay victims of the disease started appearing in the medical literature in 1982, a more generalized name took hold: Acquired Immune Deficiency Syndrome, or AIDS.

At this point, no one knew what the disease was, what caused it, or how to prevent it. All people knew was that it seemed to almost always be fatal. Gay people remained most closely identified with the disease. Some others falling ill had blood-clotting disorders—sickened, we now know, during transfusions. Heroin users also appeared to be at risk.

Then, in July 1982, the CDC announced another population was affected. At least 20 people from Haiti—mostly migrants who had taken to the sea fleeing the brutal regime of the dictator Jean-Claude “Baby Doc” Duvalier—had been diagnosed with Kaposi’s sarcoma or other “opportunistic infections” in Florida. Another 10 that the CDC identified only as “Haitian” had been similarly diagnosed in Brooklyn, along with one “Haitian” each in California, Georgia and New Jersey.

In retrospect, this was a red herring. Researchers learned soon after, thanks to the pioneering work of GHESKIO—a clinic founded in Port-au-Prince by the Cornell-trained Haitian physician Jean William Pape in 1982—that Haitians were being infected in the exact same ways as anyone else: through sex, drug use, blood transfusions and the like. In an interview several years ago, Pape told me that he believes the doctors were seeing cases in other nationalities at the time, but reported only on the Haitians because they did not see them as having the same privacy rights—because they were poor, black refugees.

But as the death toll rose, Americans—particularly in hard-hit cities like New York—became desperate for whatever answers they could find. On March 4, 1983, the CDC issued guidance in which it identified four risk groups for the new disease, which became known as the “Four-H Club”: homosexuals, hemophiliacs, heroin users and Haitians. The CDC noted cautiously that “very little is known about risk factors for Haitians with AIDS.”

But the damage was immediate. In the summer of 1983, after years downplaying what had seemed like a story affecting only gay people, New York media were going into AIDS-scare overdrive with screaming tabloid headlines like, “L.I. GRANDMA DIED OF AIDS” and “JUNKIE AIDS VICTIM WAS HOUSEKEEPER AT BELLEVUE.” Journalists and scientists scrambled for evidence of a link to Haiti; and given the long-standing racist attitudes of many white Americans toward the black republic, no lead seemed too salacious. Many of the papers repeated idle speculation that the disease had something to do with “voodoo practices” or, as Paul Farmer recounted in his 1992 book, AIDS and Accusation, “that Haitians may have contracted the virus from monkeys as part of bizarre sexual practices in Haitian brothels.”

The New York Times noted in late 1983 how American panic had destroyed Haiti’s tourism industry seemingly overnight, slashing the number of U.S. tourists to Haiti from 70,000 in the winter of 1981-82 to 10,000 the following year. A shipment of dresses was returned from New York because the labels said “Made in Haiti.” An American who lived in Haiti told the paper that when he had landed at John F. Kennedy International Airport, “the customs lady told me: ‘Open your passport. I’m not touching it.’” The June 20, 1983, cover story of New York magazine, titled “AIDS Anxiety,” noted: “Any homosexual or Haitian has become an object of dread.”

Lionel Legros, a Haitian-American writer and activist who worked in a Brooklyn public junior high school during the crisis, remembers training middle-school-aged children of Haitian descent how to verbally and physically defend themselves against attacks after a Haitian teaching aide was hit on the head with a brick. Haitian-American novelist Edwidge Danticat, who grew up in Brooklyn, recently wrote that at the time, “Every Haitian was suspected of having AIDS … that we had dirty blood.”

Even after the CDC removed Haitian immigrants as a special risk group in April 1985, the abusive coverage continued. On the local CBS affiliate in New York, a three-night news documentary on the AIDS crisis in late October 1985 warned viewers: “Junkies, Haitians, Homosexuals. Is it their problem? Not anymore … Channel 2 Health and Science Team discovered you may be more at risk than you imagine.” Haitian activists staged a protest at the station’s headquarters on West 57th Street—five blocks from the newly built Trump Tower.

Trump made his national debut on the same channel a few weeks later. CBS’ Mike Wallace introduced the 39-year-old budding magnate on "60 Minutes" as: “A major deal-maker. A swashbuckler. He takes chances that would make a daring man shudder.” That was true in more ways than one. Though still married to his first wife, the former Ivana Zelníčková, the budding mogul was—as Howard Stern would describe it in a 1998 interview—“screwing a lot of women.”

But as that now notorious interview made clear, Trump—who has described himself as a “germaphobe,” to the point where he fears shaking hands with strangers—was aware of the risks:

Stern: So let’s say you're with a hot chick, right? But you’re so germ paranoid, and I’m germ paranoid, do you say to them, “Look, you’ve got to go take a medical test before I do you?”

Trump: Well, you’d like to say that, and sometimes you do. The problem is that sometimes your own chemicals take over and you can’t wait. [laughs]

Stern: So you’ll just have straight intercourse with a rubber with them right?

Trump: Well, I don’t know, you know there’s lots of different ways of doing it. It’s a very complicated subject. They say that more people were killed by women in this act than killed in Vietnam.

Stern joked that the number of women Trump had slept with made him “braver than any Vietnam vet.” “Getting the Congressional Medal of Honor, in actuality,” Trump replied.

That exchange was roundly mocked during the presidential campaign as evidence that Trump did not understand the costs of war. But at some level, he was probably serious. Trump’s fear of AIDS seems to have been acute. He reportedly abandoned his relationship with his mentor, Roy Cohn, when the former aide to the red-baiting Senator Joe McCarthy was diagnosed with AIDS, which would lead to his death in 1986. “They were so close, they talked at least several times a week … And as soon as he found out, he took all his cases away from Roy except for one and got new lawyers,” Cohn’s former secretary told journalist Marcus Baram in the New Yorker.

Over the ensuring decades, both Trump and New York’s Haitian community would continue dealing with the fallout. In 1990, the Food and Drug Administration banned Haitians from donating blood because of AIDS paranoia. Between 50,000 and 80,000 people marched across the Brooklyn Bridge in protest, blocking traffic for hours. The FDA lifted the ban.

A year later, following a coup d’état in Haiti carried out by paramilitaries linked to the CIA, thousands of Haitians began fleeing for safety in the United States. More than 200 Haitian refugees who had been approved for asylum, but tested positive for HIV or were related to someone who had, were imprisoned in Guantanamo Bay. As the humanitarian crisis stretched into the 1992 U.S. presidential election, the political debate about what to do with the refugees created another destructive round of publicity. The supposed link between Haitians and AIDS continued to be fodder for "Saturday Night Live" writers and Hollywood filmmakers in the late 1990s. As recently as 2010, a DJ of Puerto Rican descent on New York’s Hot 97 radio, cracked, “The reason I’m HIV negative is because I don’t mess with Haitian girls.”

***

Today, it is mainly those who lived through the early AIDS panic, and the ensuing discrimination against people of Haitian descent, who remember the stigma. But many in the community fear that, thanks to Trump’s comments, it will return. “We were the scapegoat at that time, and I think that’s exactly what Trump is doing again,” said Legros, the Brooklyn-based writer, adding that Haitian groups in New York are planning a new round of protests against Trump and the slur.

Over the years, Trump has promised to use proceeds from book sales and “Trump: The Game” to fund AIDS research. It is not clear to what extent he did. (According to the Washington Post, he crashed a ribbon-cutting for a nursery school for children with AIDS in 1996, but does not appear to have donated anything.) But he does have at least one AIDS-related accomplishment to his name. In 2006, Trump wrote the foreword to medical anthropologist Susan Hunter’s book, AIDS in America. In it, he warned that AIDS still posed a threat to the United States—even though, according to him, “we think that AIDS can only happen to Africans as an epidemic.”

