
Ivylise Simones
Until the election, we’re bringing you “The Trump Files,” a daily dose of telling episodes, strange-but-true stories, or curious scenes from the life of presumptive GOP nominee Donald Trump.
There was a time when Donald Trump spoke out against racism.
In 1999, when Trump was flirting with the idea of seeking the Reform Party’s presidential nomination, he paid a visit to a museum run by the Simon Wiesenthal Center, an organization that promotes human rights and studies the Holocaust. In a rare moment of eloquence, Trump called out his potential competitor for the nomination, commentator Pat Buchanan, for suggesting in a book that Hitler had posed no direct threat to the West in 1940.
“In the 1930s, everyone thought Hitler was a fringe element who could never come to power,” Trump said, according to an article in USA Today.
“History showed otherwise,” he added. “We must recognize bigotry and prejudice and defeat it wherever it appears.”
Trump encouraged his rival to visit the museum, hoping it would enlighten him. “I think Pat Buchanan should come here, absolutely,” Trump said, according to the Associated Press. “His views are so far off, and what he wrote in his book was so bad.”
Nowadays, it’s fellow Republicans who have to ask Trump to avoid racist remarks and tweets that originate with anti-Semitic white supremacists.
Read the rest of “The Trump Files”:
- Trump Files #1: The Time Andrew Dice Clay Thanked Donald for the Hookers
- Trump Files #2: When Donald Tried to Stop Charlie Sheen’s Marriage to Brooke Mueller
- Trump Files #3: The Brief Life of the “Trump Chateau for the Indigent”
- Trump Files #4: Donald Thinks Asbestos Fears Are a Mob Conspiracy
- Trump Files #5: Donald’s Nuclear Negotiating Fantasy
- Trump Files #6: Donald Wants a Powerball for Spies
- Trump Files #7: Donald Gets An Allowance
- Trump Files #8: The Time He Went Bananas on a Water Cooler
- Trump Files #9: The Great Geico Boycott
- Trump Files #10: Donald Trump, Tax-Hike Crusader
- Trump Files #11: Watch Donald Trump Say He Would Have Done Better as a Black Man
- Trump Files #12: Donald Can’t Multiply 16 and 7
- Trump Files #13: Watch Donald Sing the “Green Acres” Theme Song in Overalls
- Trump Files #14: The Time Donald Trump Pulled Over His Limo to Stop a Beating
- Trump Files #15: When Donald Wanted to Help the Clintons Buy Their House
- Trump Files #16: He Once Forced a Small Business to Pay Him Royalties for Using the Word “Trump”
- Trump Files #17: He Dumped Wine on an “Unattractive Reporter”
- Trump Files #18: Behold the Hideous Statue He Wanted to Erect In Manhattan
- Trump Files #19: When Donald Was “Principal for a Day” and Confronted by a Fifth-Grader
- Trump Files #20: In 2012, Trump Begged GOP Presidential Candidates to Be Civil
- Trump Files #21: When Donald Couldn’t Tell the Difference Between Gorbachev and an Impersonator
- Trump Files #22: His Football Team Treated Its Cheerleaders “Like Hookers”
- Trump Files #23: Donald Tried to Shut Down a Bike Race Named “Rump”