It was only recently that Republican presidential candidate and front-runner Donald Trump said he’d be willing to physically fight Black Lives Matter activists if they interrupted him on stage. Now, a new report from the New Yorker relays an alarming account of how black employees at one of Donald Trump’s Atlantic City properties were routinely kept from view when the real estate magnate came to town. From writer Nick Paumgarten:
I met a bus driver named Kip Brown, who worked the Port Authority route, up and back each morning, for Academy Bus Lines. He had been at Academy for fifteen years and was No. 3 in seniority, out of seventy drivers in the region. As ridership has fallen, Academy has been cutting back on its schedule. The number of visitors arriving by bus is an eighth of what it was a quarter century ago. In the spring, Brown, just forty-seven, retired.
Now he was looking for work as a livery driver. Brown also used to work in the casinos, at the Showboat, bussing tables, and at Trump’s Castle, stripping and waxing floors. “When Donald and Ivana came to the casino, the bosses would order all the black people off the floor,” he said. “It was the eighties, I was a teen-ager, but I remember it: they put us all in the back.”
For more on how Trump feels about “the blacks,” head over to Gawker’s decidedly nasty collection of quotes.