Donald Trump (Gage Skidmore) and Kwame Jackson (CNN)
Donald Trump’s former lawyer Michael Cohen alleges that the president called a contestant on The Apprentice a “Black fag.”
Cohen, commonly known as the president’s “fixer” during his time with Trump, made the allegation in his new book, Disloyal: A Memoir.
He claims that Trump ensured that Jackson Kwame, a gay, Black man, would not win the NBC reality show’s first season in 2004.
“There was no way I was going to let this Black fag win,” Trump allegedly said, according to Cohen.
Kwame, a Harvard graduate and businessman, was the runner-up of the first season, after Trump opted to fire him and instead hire Bill Rancic, future husband of E! News host Giuliana Rancic.
“Trump reminisced to me about Rancic, who had been in a head-to-head with another contestant, Kwame Jackson,” Cohen wrote. “Kwame was not only a nice guy, but also a brilliant Harvard MBA graduate. Trump was explaining his back-and-forth about not picking Kwame. ‘There was no way I was going to let this black fag win,’ he said to me.”
Cohen claimed that Trump frequently made racist comments off-camera: “As a rule, Trump expressed low opinions of all Black folks. What he said in private was far worse than what he uttered in public.”
Trump has previously been accused of using racial slurs during filming of The Apprentice and spin-off The Celebrity Apprentice, which he hosted between 2004 and 2015,
Magician and entertainer Penn Jillette, of duo Penn & Teller, told Vulture in 2018 that Trump would “say racially insensitive things that made me uncomfortable” while filming Celebrity Apprentice in 2012.
“I don’t think he ever said anything in that room like ‘African-Americans are inferior’ or anything about rape or grabbing women, but of those two hours every other day in a room with him, every 10 minutes was fingernails on chalkboard,” Jillette said.
Former Trump political aide Omarosa Manigault Newman, who also appeared in the first season of The Apprentice alongside Jackson, accused Trump of using a racial slur in reference to Jackson while filming their season.
At the time of her accusation in 2018, Jackson told Variety, “Hard pass on all things Omarosa, no thank you. By me commenting or you covering the story, it simply adds fuel and attention to tomfoolery.”
However, later that year, after Cohen told Variety that Trump had referred to Jackson using a homophobic slur, Jackson told Newsweek that he was “definitely not surprised” by the alleged slur.
“Did it hurt me personally? Not in the slightest,” he said. “I have a reasonably thick skin, and I have worked in corporate America. I have been a black man for 44 years in America, and I know what that means, and I know what comes with the territory.”
Last week, Cohen appeared on MSNBC’s The Rachel Maddow Show, where he said that Trump hated former President Barack Obama and frequently made racist remarks about him, The Hill reports.
“His hatred for Barack Obama is plain and simple: he’s Black, he went to Harvard Law, he graduated at the top of his class, he’s incredibly articulate, he’s all the things that Donald Trump wants to be,” Cohen said. “And he just can’t handle it. So what do you do if you’re Donald Trump and you can’t handle it? You attack it.”
Trump frequently touted the false conspiracy theory that President Obama was not a U.S. citizen as part of attempts to delegitimize his presidency, including a 2011 appearance on The View in which he asked the president to “show his birth certificate.”
In 2018, former First Lady Michelle Obama wrote in her memoir Becoming that she would “never forgive” Trump for spreading “reckless innuendos” about her family that endangered their safety.
“The whole [birther] thing was crazy and mean-spirited, of course, its underlying bigotry and xenophobia hardly,” Obama wrote. “But it was also dangerous, deliberately meant to stir up the wingnuts and kooks.”
In a statement, White House press secretary Kayleigh McEnany disputed the claims made in Cohen’s book, saying, “Michael Cohen is a disgraced felon and disbarred lawyer who lied to Congress. He has lost all credibility, and it’s unsurprising to see his latest attempt to profit off of lies.”
A federal judge has blocked the Trump administration from enforcing a directive from Secretary of State Marco Rubio that prohibits transgender and nonbinary individuals from obtaining passports reflecting their gender identities.
Rubio's directive, issued in January, had instructed State Department staff to freeze all applications for passports with "X" gender markers or applications requesting changes to gender markers on existing passports.
Rubio also directed his subordinate to enforce a section of the Immigration and Nationalist Act that allows the United States to refuse entry to any visa applicant who commits identity fraud or misrepresents who they are, with particular focus on transgender athletes from foreign countries.
On July 21, Wilmer Chavarria, superintendent of Vermont's Winooski School District, was detained for hours by U.S. Customs and Border Protection officers at Houston's George Bush Intercontinental Airport after returning from a family visit to Nicaragua with his husband, Essex High School teacher Cyrus Dudgeon.
Officers seized Chavarria's phone and computer, separated him from Dudgeon, and interrogated him for at least five hours about his marriage and his job, according to Vermont's alternative weekly Seven Days.
During the interrogation, agents questioned whether Chavarria and Dudgeon were really married and repeatedly asked if Chavarria was actually a school superintendent. In an email to school board members, Chavarria described the experience as "abusive interrogation" and said he was "treated in a manner that is deeply disturbing and unacceptable."
"I could not be more thrilled to bring the show back!"
Patrik-Ian Polk is primed and ready for the return of Noah's Arc, the iconic Logo series he created, wrote, and directed, and which aired for two impactful seasons from October 2005 to October 2006.
The first gay Black TV series, following fabulously femme screenwriter Noah, his best friends Alex, Ricky, and Chance, and his new man Wade, the show fit a world of hot topics -- HIV/AIDS, sexual fluidity, infidelity, homophobia -- into its too-brief run.
Fans might have been left hanging by the series' unexpected cancellation, but Polk and crew reunited in 2008 to tie up some loose ends in a film, the wedding comedy Noah's Arc: Jumping the Broom.
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