The Hebrew Bible is contradictory about “the sins of the fathers.” On the one hand, Exodus 34:7 commends “visiting the iniquity of the fathers upon the children, . . . unto the third and to the fourth generation.” On the other hand, Deuteronomy 24:16 says: “The fathers shall not be put to death for the children, neither shall the children be put to death for the fathers: every man shall be put to death for his own sin.”
Take you pick, but we all know from our own experience that—sometimes at least—“the apple does not fall far from the tree.”
In the case of Donald Trump the tree was Fred Trump of Jamaica, Queens, who lived there in a house with The Donald's grandmother, according to the 1930 Census. On Memorial Day, 1927, he was arrested for participating with 1,000 KKK marchers in a violent brawl with fans of Mussolini that resulted in two dead Italian Americans. Fred Trump’s real gripe seems to have been less with the Duce than with New York’s Catholic Governor, Al Smith, the next year who became the Democratic party’s pioneering presidential candidate, whose “alienism” Trump detested.
The Donald of course lied about this embarrassing bit of family history when called out about it in the recent past. Maybe this family skeleton is another reason he was slow to unambiguously disavow the KKK.
Let’s move from the tree to the apple and the seed of the next generation. We now know that The Donald not only fully credentialed a white supremacist group that wants to restore (black) slavery to his rallies, but that his son, Donald, Jr., gave an interview to a member of this “cesspool.” James Edwards, host of “The Political Cesspool,” wrote this in his blog: “I attended a Donald Trump rally in Memphis on Saturday night as a fully credentialed member of the media and enjoyed the unique experience of being able to air a live broadcast of The Political Cesspool Radio Program from inside the press pen while the event was in full swing. Next Saturday’s show will feature a previously taped 20-minute interview with Donald Trump, Jr.”
Of course, Donald Jr. through a spokesman also denies such an interview took place.
Most people know that Donald Sr. is a New Yorker, born and bred. But many don’t know he was born, not in Manhattan, but in the Borough of Queens. (I was born in the Bronx the same year: 1946.) Fans of the late actor, Carol O’Connor, star of Norman Lear’s “All in the Family,” may remember that his character, the unforgettably, imperviously bigoted Archie Bunker, was also a product of Queens. At the time, when liberals often stereotyped Irish Catholics (in fact, themselves a quite liberal ethnic group) as hopelessly reactionary bigots, Lear instead made Archie a Protestant Irishman or “Orangeman.”
Why Lear did this, I can only speculate, Yet as Kenneth T. Jackson showed in The Klan in The Cities (1992), the KKK—contrary to the stereotype of it as exclusively a rural and small town affair west of the Hudson—had strength in the outer boroughs of New York City: especially Queens.
Ted Cruz pilloried Donald Trump as the epitome of liberal “New York values.” I fear he instead may be in the tradition of the worst of “Queens values” going back to the anti-Catholic, anti-Jewish, anti-Black KKK of the 1920s.
