A former employee of the Trump Management company recounted in an interview with NBC News how Donald Trump’s father would systematically discriminate against black apartment applicants, including one instance in which the GOP nominee nodded as the elder Trump said “You know I don’t rent to the N-word.”
“Mr. Trump and his son Donald came into the office. I asked what I should do with this application because she’s calling constantly and his response to me was, ‘You know I don’t rent to the N-word. Put it in a drawer and forget about it,'” retired Trump rental agent Stanley Leibowitz, 89, told NBC News.
Leibowitz also told a producer from NBC that Trump nodded in agreement with his father.
“He shook his head, in, ‘That’s the way it’s supposed to be,’” he said.
The application in question belonged to Annette Gandy Fortt, a New York City school teacher who applied for a Trump apartment in 1973. Her case was eventually part of a federal racial discrimination lawsuit filed by the Justice Department against the Trumps that ended with a consent decree.
As Donald Trump noted during the first presidential debate, “we settled the suit with zero—with no admission of guilt. It was very easy to do, but they sued a lot of people.”
A Trump campaign spokeswoman said in an email to NBC News that there was “absolutely no merit to the allegations.”
“This suit was brought as part of a nationwide inquiry against a number of companies, and the matter was ultimately settled without any finding of liability and without any admission of wrongdoing whatsoever,” spokeswoman Hope Hicks told NBC News.
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