Don't Look Now, But Trump Doesn't Like Southerners Either

In fact, we'll go one step further: Donald Trump is an elitist who actually looks down on people he thinks (or wants to believe) are not as smart or as rich as he is.

The latest evidence of this comes to us via a trio of recent news stories. It relates specifically to how Mr. Trump views Citizens of the American South, a part of the country that gave Mr. Trump strong electoral support in 2016.

The first of these stories appeared in a Politico article in late August, an article which focused on how Mr. Trump was attempting to turn Republican Senators against Attorney General Jeff Sessions, a native of Alabama. The article included the following paragraph:

…Trump has come to resent him {Mr. Sessions} for other reasons {than recusing himself from the Russia investigation}, griping to aides and lawmakers that the attorney general doesn't have the Ivy League pedigree the president prefers, that he can't stand his Southern accent and that Sessions isn't a capable defender of the president on television - in part because he "talks like he has marbles in his mouth," the president has told aides.

(Sessions image from nbcnews.com)

Shortly thereafter, in early September, excerpts from the latest book by Pulitzer Prize-winning reporter Bob Woodward were published. "Fear: Trump in the White House" is an inside account of Mr. Trump and his administration, which describes how Mr. Trump's anger with his Attorney General (who had been one of Mr. Trump's earliest and strongest Senate supporters) revealed some of Mr. Trump's broader feelings about the South:

"This guy is mentally retarded. He's this dumb Southerner." Trump then did an unflattering impression of Sessions' Alabama accent. "How in the world was I ever persuaded to pick him for my Attorney General? He couldn't even be a one-person country lawyer down in Alabama. What business does he have being Attorney General?"

{As a side note, wasn't Mr. Trump fond of saying how he knew so many smart people and how he would fill his administration with the smartest people?}

(Woodward (r) with former partner Carl Bernstein - image from dailykos.com)

Reacting to the Woodward excerpts, Mr. Trump went public with a rebuttal in which he denied ever having called anyone "mentally retarded" or "a dumb Southerner": "I said NEITHER, never used those terms on anyone, including Jeff, and being a southerner is a GREAT thing." "I don't talk the way I am quoted. If I did I would not have been elected President. These quotes were made up."

Unfortunately for Mr. Trump, a number of people responded to his rebuttal with evidence that he had, in fact, used both of those terms in the past. At least two recorded appearances on Howard Stern's radio show have Mr. Trump using the term "retarded" or "mentally retarded" when discussing an unnamed reporter and an unnamed golf pro, and the Daily Beast reported two years ago that he used the term when referring to deaf actress Marlee Matlin during the time she was appearing on the Trump television show "Celebrity Apprentice".

As to the "dumb Southerner" comments, a former employee at the New York Post, Jeane MacIntosh, was interviewed after the Trump denial and spoke about a discussion Mr. Trump had once had with her. It pertained to the family of one of Mr. Trump's ex-wives, Marla Maples. Ms. MacIntosh was a deputy editor at the Post's gossip column, Page Six, which had used Mr. Trump as a source for decades. In that conversation, Mr. Trump told her he was going to divorce Ms. Maples and then continued: "Are you old enough to remember the show 'The Beverly Hillbillies?"

Per Ms. MacIntosh, Mr. Trump then laughed and said, "That's exactly her family, except they came to New York City instead of Beverly Hills." He said that Ms. Maples was constantly surrounded 'by an entourage of dumb Southerners.' He even adopted a fake southern accent to mimic Ms. Maples's mother.

(Beverly Hillbillies image from hollywoodreporter.com)

For most of us in the South, that's enough of these types of comments. We're tired of being made fun of or stereotyped in this fashion and we still get angry that some people around the country continue to feel the way that Mr. Trump apparently does. But we can't say we're all that surprised.

For those of us in the North, we don't like the fact that the Trump comments will confirm to some Southerners an equally wrong stereotype regarding how Northerners view the South.

So, what's the takeaway from all this? Besides the fact that these new revelations reinforce our feelings that Mr. Trump is someone unworthy to hold public office, maybe it's time we all try to stop using generalizations about various groups of people. Let's try and commit to making our judgements based on the individual, not based on inaccurate stereotypes of the various groups they may belong to.