Comrades

On Sunday, Democratic senator Mark Kelly of Arizona, followed by Republican senator Markwayne Mullin of Oklahoma, were interviewed by Dana Bash on CNN's State of the Union. You won't be surprised that the staunchly right-wing Mullin falsely accused Kelly of calling President Trump "racist." You will be surprised that it was nowhere near the most ridiculous thing he said.

The President wrote on Truth Social "I will permanently pause migration from all Third World Countries to allow the US system to fully recover, terminate all of the millions of Biden illegal admissions." Although he added "anyone who is not a net asset to the United States, or is incapable of loving our Country" will be removed from the USA, he did not clarify whether an incumbent President who hates his own country is included.

In response, Senator Kelly told Bash that the President "has kicked out legal immigrants already. This is kind of more of the same from this President. When he says things like Third World countries, what is he really saying? I think what he's saying is, he doesn't want brown people in our country. And that is disturbing and it's un-American."

Mullin is a faithful and enthusiastic ally of Donald, and Kelly's remark set him off.

Sen. Markwayne Mullin: "Mark Kelly is saying the most ridiculous things I've ever heard…He just got done saying that the president was racist because he doesn't like brown people, yet I sit in front of you as a Cherokee Indian and I'm very close friends with the president." pic.twitter.com/ueb3twU4I4

— The Bulwark (@BulwarkOnline) November 30, 2025

Although Kelly did imply that Trump is a racial bigot, he did not say that Donald is a racist.  He argued that Trump not wanting "brown people in our country" is "un-American." If Mullin takes issue with that connection, he didn't say he did.

That is not a difference without a distinction; Republican voters typically are aggrieved because they believe that Democrats, liberals, or progressives are always calling them, and anything that moves, "racist."  Mullin chose to feed into that narrative, a false one though the anger that conservatives feel because they believe they are being labeled "racist" is a political liability for Democrats.

The Oklahoma senator claims citizenship in the Cherokee Nation and strongly implies that Trump could not be "racist" because the two are "very close friends."  Of course, that does not preclude Donald from harboring a prejudice against tribal members generally. 

In 2011, Bradford Plumer of The New Republic reviewed that old “some of my best friends….” defense, which self-identified tribal member Mullin trotted out to defend Donald Trump. Plumer noted the first recorded use in the 1908 presidential campaign but

By 1928, the trope was being trotted out as a defense against accusations of intolerance. John Roach Straton, a fiery Baptist preacher from New York, had launched a noisy campaign against Al Smith, a Catholic Democrat running for president. Straton was the guy who popularized the notion that Smith was “the candidate of rum, Romanism, and rebellion,” but, responding to charges that he was some sort of anti-Catholic bigot, Straton told the AP, “Understand I am not a foe of the Catholics. Some of my dearest friends are Catholic.” (To prove his open-mindedness, Straton even agreed to debate Smith inside New York’s St. Patrick’s Cathedral.)…

The most infamous case, however, came in 1937. Hugo Black had been nominated for the Supreme Court, and the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette had just uncorked a series of articles revealing Black’s past involvement in the Ku Klux Klan. Black’s defense memorably included the line “Some of my best friends are Jews,” which earned him no small amount of scorn from newspaper editorialists (that line, after all, had been the title of a book-length history of anti-Semitism by Robert Gessner the previous year). That line couldn't stop Black's confirmation...

In 1986, Mary Jackman and Marie Crane published a paper in Public Opinion Quarterly investigating what they called the “cynical reasoning implied by the infamous ‘Some of my best friends are black, but…’ expression.” Their survey data suggested that “personal interracial contact is selective in its effects on whites’ racial attitudes, that intimacy is less important than variety of contacts, and that any effects are contingent on the relative socioeconomic status of black contacts.” In other words, having a black friend or two wasn’t at all incompatible with holding racist beliefs about broader groups.

In decades past, the notion that if an individual had a close friend who was black or gay, he or she could not possibly be prejudiced against the demographic group to which the other person belonged. Once (justifiably) derided as ridiculous, this chestnut now is applied more widely, as Mullin demonstrated.

Yet, if Kelly believed that anyone not already realizing that Trump is a bigot could be convinced by rational argument, he could have presented a wealth of evidence.

In testimony before a House of Representatives committee in 1993 in which he argued that the federal government gave tribes operating gambling facilities an unfair advantage over his own, Trump stated "if you look- if you look at some of the reservations that you have approved- you, sir, in your great wisdom, have approved- will tell you right now, they don't look like Indians to me, and they don't look like Indians."  

"Indians" don't all look alike. In a 2011 profile of Senator Mullin published in High Country News, a reporter- himself a member of Cherokee Nation- wrote that his subject "does not fit stereotypical notions of what it means to be Indigenous, either in how he looks or how he operates as a lawmaker. Mullin is also white-passing."  

In his ongoing effort to rewrite history

In March 2025, President Trump ordered the Smithsonian Institution and the secretary of the interior to identify sites that may include “improper partisan ideology.” The New York Times reports that the administration is reviewing scores of exhibits across the country that mention slavery, climate change, or Native Americans, such as exhibits on displays at Independence National Historical Park in Philadelphia, Cape Hatteras National Seashore in North Carolina, and the National Mall in Washington, D.C. The National Park Service has also been directed to review all items in gift shops for “anti-American content.” As a result, the administration is considering banning books from gift shops, including The 1619 Project on the history of slavery in America and a picture book about former Interior Secretary Deb Haaland, the first Native American Cabinet secretary.

The removal of physical exhibits on public lands began in July 2025 when the administration removed an exhibit at Muir Woods National Monument called “History Under Construction.” This exhibit brought attention to the Native Coast Miwok people, who have lived in the region for thousands of years, as well as a women’s movement that was among the first to protect Muir Woods. It also addressed the racist ideologies of many of the people who helped protect the monument across the 19th and 20th centuries.

This doesn't prove Donald Trump hates tribal peoples but it pertains more directly to the issue than does the friendship of one individual, who is as white as most non-Hispanic white Americans, with the President. For what it's worth: for most people, appearances matter and white people usually are more favorably inclined to someone of a different ethnic group if he/she does not look dramatically unlike white people. Markwayne Mullin fits the bill.

Nonetheless, Donald Trump can love everyone belonging to a Native American tribe and still be not only a bigot, but an actual racist.  We know that because he is one, as is clear from the record, especially from an incident in 1988 and one in 2024.

Jack O'Donnell was hired in 1987 as Vice President of Trump Plaza casino in Atlantic City and the following year was promoted to President. He left in late 1990 and shortly thereafter wrote "Trumped! The Inside Story of the Real Donald Trump, His Cunning Rise and Spectacular Fall."  Although highly critical of Trump, O'Donnell went silent for the next quarter century because "I wouldn't have discounted the possibility that he could change." However, he became less sanguine about his former boss when the latter embarked upon his birther conspiracy against President Barack Obama.  

O'Donnell observed Trump in June of 2016 "preening in the lobby of Trump Tower amid a phalanx of American flags, launching his candidacy with a promise to build his now-infamous wall to protect us from Mexican criminals and 'rapists.' He hadn't changed at all." The author noted 

In 1988, shortly after I was promoted to president of Trump Plaza Hotel & Casino, he invited me up to New York for lunch. There was a lot to talk over one issue in particular: one of our senior managers, who happened to be African-American. Donald considered him incompetent and wanted him fired. When I acknowledged some shortcomings in the man’s performance, he instantly became enthused. “Yeah, I never liked the guy,” he said. “And isn’t it funny, I’ve got black accountants at Trump Castle and Trump Plaza. Black guys counting my money! I hate it. The only kind of people I want counting my money are short guys that wear yarmulkes every day.”

I was mortified. We were in a restaurant in Trump Tower. I worried he’d be overheard. But he went on, “Besides that, I’ve got to tell you something else: I think the guy is lazy, and it’s probably not his fault because laziness is a trait in blacks. It really is. I believe that. It’s not anything they can control.”

Laziness as a "trait" in blacks (or individuals of any racial group) would be a reference to an inherited characteristic- nature not nurture.

Fast forward to December of 2023, passing over numerous pejorative remarks about people based upon their race, color, national origin or gender, to one particularly revealing remark.  During a campaign appearance

“They let — I think the real number is 15, 16 million people into our country. When they do that, we got a lot of work to do. They’re poisoning the blood of our country,” Trump told the crowd at a rally in New Hampshire. “That’s what they’ve done. They poison mental institutions and prisons all over the world, not just in South America, not just to three or four countries that we think about, but all over the world. They’re coming into our country from Africa, from Asia, all over the world.”

Trump then repeated the use of “poisoning” in a post on his social media website Truth Social, saying overnight in an all-caps post, that “illegal immigration is poisoning the blood of our nation. They’re coming from prisons, from mental institutions — from all over the world.”

The term “blood poisoning” was used by Hitler in his manifesto “Mein Kampf,” in which he criticized immigration and the mixing of races. “All great cultures of the past perished only because the originally creative race died out from blood poisoning,” Hitler wrote.

This wasn't a teenager, or an adult who has experienced an unusually secluded upbringing somewhere. This was a former President of the United States of America announcing as clearly as he could that he is a flat-out racist.

Nonetheless, one member of the House of Representatives, a close ally of Donald Trump, says the President couldn't be a racist because the two of them are pals. Well, that settles that, I suppose.

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