THE recent racist meltdown by United States President Donald Trump is no aberration.

It is in fact part of a deep history of racism by the far-right US president.

It is a disgrace that there is any doubt that Trump was personally responsible for posting a video that depicted Barack and Michelle Obama as apes — a well-worn racist trope against black people.

What is perhaps even more of a disgrace is the pass that he seems to be given over this in the US and by the so-called international community.

There was barely a whimper from world leaders over the posting by Trump. This perhaps says as much about them as it does against racist Trump.

The fact is that Trump’s racism has been crystal clear from the moment he entered public life.

He has a well documented history of racist remarks during his time as a New York real-estate developer during the 1970s and ’80s and, of course, he infamously relentlessly lied that Obama was born in Kenya and therefore ineligible to be president.

This was, of course, code for “Obama is black so he is not eligible to be president.”

His supporters certainly understood the code as did many Americans for whom such tropes were not enough to stop them casting a vote for him even while claiming not to be racist.

Trump himself has claimed that he “is the least racist person” you will ever meet. That, if true, would be extremely scary, and flies in the face of all the evidence in front of our eyes.

So when you read what I write below, ask yourself how he has been given such a pass so that he could appear in a walk-on part in a popular Christmas movie, become a reality TV star and then, more disturbingly, president of the US?

During the 1970s Trump’s real estate company tried to get away with not renting apartments to black people. According to the federal government Trump gave preferential treatment to whites. Clearly against the law even in the US.

He has been found to have been racist towards the black employees at his casinos, according to as many sources as you care to find. None of this is as secret as his links to convicted sex-trafficker Jeffrey Epstein.

A former executive at one of his hotels said Trump slammed a black accountant saying: “Black guys counting my money! I hate it. I think that guy is lazy. And it’s probably not his fault, because laziness is a trait in blacks.”

The alleged laziness of black people being yet another racist trope peddled since the invention of racism to justify the enslavement of Africans and why it was necessary to use the whip on plantations.

One of Trump’s most infamous bouts of racism came in 1989 when he took out adverts in New York newspapers demanding the death penalty for five black and Latino teenagers accused of raping a white woman in Central Park.

As late as 2019, Trump insisted the five were guilty more than 15 years after DNA evidence conclusively showed they did not commit the crime.

Trump began his 2016 presidential campaign with a speech that denounced Mexican immigrants as criminals and rapists.

He hasn’t ever changed his tune on this front. Much of the activities of what appears to be a personally controlled masked militia under the title of the Immigration and Customs Enforcement agency, which seems extremely happy to recruit far-right activists, is directed at rounding up Latinos and Latinas as well as black Muslims.

In December 2015, Trump ordered the “total and complete shutdown of Muslims entering the US.” Not content with this, Trump also insisted that any Muslim-Americans outside of the US at the time of the announcement would not be allowed to return.

Of course the use of immigration or emigration as a weapon of authoritarianism is nothing new in the US. Communists in the US know all about that. But here we have an example of a racist US president prepared to directly use the tactic based on colour, nationality and religion.

He accused 15,000 immigrants from Haiti in June 2017 of all having Aids and that Nigerians arriving in the US would be so excited by such a spiritual experience that they would never “go back to their huts” in Africa.

Before the 2018 midterm elections, as his popularity continued to sink, Trump played the race card with abandon. His campaign produced an advert showing a caravan of migrants travelling through Mexico.

The advert, which claimed the caravan included “criminals and unknown Middle Easterners,” was so racist that usually Trump-cheerleading Fox News wouldn’t even air it.

Expect more of the same as we head toward what increasingly looks like a car-crash election for Trump at the midterms in November.

We are likely to get more of the same rhetoric as he used during a 2018 White House meeting where he labelled undocumented immigrants “animals,” that were allegedly ready to “pour into and infest our country,” with diseases.

Trump often highlights crimes committed by blacks and Hispanics but is typically slow to say anything about hate crimes committed by whites.

A favourite Trump tactic is to attack African-Americans for being unpatriotic, ungrateful and disrespectful. He has also insisted that African-Americans are the racist ones and that they are extremely — all of them — unintelligent.

He even had the audacity to suggest that there was not enough talk about the good things about slavery.

Trump really had a meltdown during the height of the Black Lives Matter movement.

In 2020 Trump retweeted a post of a white man chanting “white power” to a group of Black Lives Matter protesters in Florida.

As with his recent meltdown Trump took down the post during mounting criticism. Of course, no doubt, the post was done by the same poor staffer responsible for the racist post about the Obamas.

But one also need only to look back to August 2017 when counter protester Heather Heyer was killed by far-right activist Alex Fields during a Unite the Right rally in Charlottesville, Virginia.

Trump’s response was to insist that there were “some very fine people on both sides.”

The fact is I could go on and on with numerous other examples of his racism towards Native Americans, Jewish people, Indians, Koreans and, well, frankly anyone who isn’t white.

One of the many problems I have around Trump’s racism, having known of his racism for years and attempted to raise the alarm from the beginning, is that he continues to get away with his despicable behaviour and world leaders still rush to be photographed next to him.

The man is a racist and should be called out at every opportunity by everyone including so-called world leaders — regardless of diplomatic niceties.