Almost three decades before he began his ultimately successful run for the office of President of the United States – calling for a complete ban of all Muslims and the deportation of every single undocumented immigrant, and branding all Mexicans “rapists” – Donald Trump was a billionaire living in New York, calling for the death penalty to be reinstated so that five young boys who had been wrongly accused of rape could be executed.
Trump took out full-page advertisements in newspapers, specifically saying that the five boys, dubbed “the Central Park Five” – including 15-year-old Yusef Salaam – should be given the death penalty.
According to Salaam himself, Trump was “the fire-starter” who got the public on the side of the wrongful accusations, leading more and more people to believe that the five innocent boys had committed the crimes.
Trump was the keystone of the white side of a race war
It all went down in 1989, when the crack epidemic in New York City was at an all-time high, and the vaguely veiled “war on drugs” (read: war on racial minorities) was raging on, and the Central Park Five story with its miscarriage of justice is considered to be one of the key moments in the history of New York’s difficult race relations. And Trump – the man who, last year, was elected to be the President of the United States – was the keystone of the white side of it.