It can be easy to lose perspective, amid the upheavals of the news cycle, particularly in a week like this. So it’s worth summoning a little historical perspective on the man who lost the election by three million votes and became our president.

I won’t try to speculate on what, exactly, Fred Trump taught his son about race relations. We know that the senior Trump attended a rally of the Ku Klux Klan. We know that he was later sued by the federal government for racially discriminatory practices, and that his son Donald, who revered him, would later face the same charges. But again: we can’t know what passed between father and son.

One thing we do know about Donald Trump is that his first foray into civic activism took place in 1989. It was provoked by an incident in which a white woman, an investment banker, was raped and severely assaulted while jogging through Central Park at night.

A number of teenagers had been carousing in the park and police quickly developed a theory that five of them (the Central Park Five) had committed the crime. The suspects, four African Americans and one Hispanic, confessed after lengthy police interrogations.

The case became a tabloid sensation. Two weeks after the arrests, Donald Trump took out full-page ads in the city’s four major dailies, topped by two giant headlines:

BRING BACK THE DEATH PENALTY. BRING BACK OUR POLICE! What has happened to our city over the past ten years? What has happened to law and order…What has happened to the respect for authority? What has happened is the complete breakdown of life as we knew it…. Mayor Koch has stated that hate and rancor should be removed from our hearts. I do not think so. I want to hate these muggers and murderers. They should be forced to suffer and, when they kill, they should be executed for their crimes.

The response was immediate. One woman suggested, on live television, that the suspects be castrated. Others, such as Pat Buchanan, called for them to be hanged in Central Park by June 1.

As a reminder: they had yet to be tried.

Although no physical evidence linked them to the crime, the Central Park Five were convicted on the basis of their police confessions. In 2002, a judge vacated the guilty verdicts, after DNA evidence exonerated them, and identified the actual perpetrator, a serial rapist who confessed to the crime and provided prosecutors with precise details of how he carried it out.