“He saw his capitalist impulses as a remedy to urban decline and credited himself in excess,” D’Antonio added. “This was the mid-1970s, and he was already trying to take advantage of the idea that inner cities are dangerous and require a white rescuer.”

In October 1973, the Department of Justice sued the Trump Management Corporation for refusing to rent or negotiating rental rates on the basis of race and color. This prompted Trump’s first of many public comments to the New York Times that the charges were “ridiculous.”

With the help of his lawyer, Roy Cohn, the Trump family countersued the department for $100 million in what they called “bias” damages, in an attempt to turn the racial charges on their head. Ultimately, the Trump family reached a settlement with the federal government in 1975 and at the time, Trump made sure to note the settlement was not an admission of guilt.

In 1989, Trump took out four full page ads in New York city papers to argue for bringing back the death penalty in light of the Central Park attack for which five black teenagers were falsely charged and sent to prison. “I want to hate these murderers and I always will,” Trump said in the May 1989 newspaper ads. “I am not looking to psychoanalyze or understand them, I am looking to punish them.”

Years later, Trump never fully backed down from those Central Park 5 comments despite all of the evidence the teens were innocent.

The tough-on-crime ethos has extended to Trump’s political career, during which he has tended to double down on the instinct to fight.

On Saturday, his comments on the aftermath of Floyd’s death focused on the might of police and the Secret Service and cast African Americans — whom the Trump campaign is aggressively courting — as outside of his own political base. “MAGA is Make American Great Again. By the way, they love African American people, they love Black people. MAGA loves the black people,” Trump told reporters before boarding a flight.

Race, for Trump, remains an us versus them mentality that comes from his childhood, said biographer D’Antonio. “Trump was a superrich, white kid of privilege of the 1950s whose life was overturned by the 1960s. He never got over it,” he added.

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