The “laziness” statement came after Donald Trump started having financial difficulties at his casinos in Atlantic City. Trump’s response? He had black accountants. And he managed to squeeze two forms of racism into a single statement.

John O’Donnell, who was president of the Trump Plaza Hotel & Casino and later wrote a memoir about his experience, said Trump blamed financial difficulties partly on African American accountants. “I’ve got black accountants at Trump Castle and at Trump Plaza — black guys counting my money!” O’Donnell’s book quoted Trump as saying. “I hate it. The only kind of people I want counting my money are short guys that wear yarmulkes every day. Those are the kind of people I want counting my money. Nobody else. . . . Besides that, I’ve got to tell you something else. 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. It’s not anything they can control.”

Of course, Trump hasn’t read O’Donnell’s book, because Donald Trump doesn't read.​ But he did give an interview.

Trump told Playboy magazine that O’Donnell’s memoir was “probably true.”

For those who believe that racism isn’t inherent, but has to be taught. Trump apparently had plenty of opportunities to learn—going back at least to when he was working with his father in the 1970s.

When a black woman asked to rent an apartment in a Brooklyn complex managed by Donald Trump’s real estate company, she said she was told that nothing was available. A short time later, a white woman who made the same request was invited to choose between two available apartments. … In October 1973, the Justice Department filed a civil rights case that accused the Trump firm, whose complexes contained 14,000 apartments, of violating the Fair Housing Act of 1968.

The Trumps hired Roy Cohn—yes, that Roy Cohn—to defend them in the case, They did what the Trumps always do, countersued for $100 million and made claims that the government was trying to force them to “rent to people on welfare.” Cohn also helped them concoct a series of claims that the Justice Department was employing “Gestapo tactics.” Cohn’s antics were thrown out. The Trumps settled the case.

But Trump already had a plan to keep from having to deal with that sort of problem again.

At the time the suit was filed, Trump had been thinking about veering away from his father’s ­focus on providing housing for ­lower- and middle-income residents of Brooklyn and Queens, and envisioning his future as a developer of luxury buildings for the rich in Manhattan.

The rest is history.

But Donald Trump’s attitude about race? That’s still very much the present.