CHRIS CUOMO (CO-HOST): What were you going for and where did you come out on it?
NICHOLAS KRISTOF: Well, first of all, I do think that racist is a loaded word. I think we should be really careful about tossing it around in a political season. So I wanted to go back and look at the evidence. And so I looked back over 45 years, and, frankly, it's pretty devastating. I started in the 1970s, when the Nixon White House, which was not a famous champion of civil rights exactly, sued the Trump Organization, of which Donald was then the president, for systematically denying blacks access to the apartments that the Trump Organization owned. You wade through more than 1,000 pages from this lawsuit, and it repeatedly shows that a white tester would go to a Trump apartment, and be shown several apartments immediately available. A black person, as a tester, would go and be told that nothing was available. Trump employees said that applications for apartments by black people were coded, C for colored, so that the central office would know to deny them. The --
ALISYN CAMEROTA (CO-HOST): So, Nicholas, so that was in the '70s, and so you went back and looked at these reams and reams of documentation and show that there was discrimination being practiced at the Trump real estate organization then. That was the ‘70s. Then what did you find in the ‘80s and the ‘90s?
KRISTOF: So, essentially this pattern continues. Trump moves into the casino business. A former Trump casino worker who was black says that when Donald Trump visited the casino in Atlantic City, the blacks would all be taken off the floor and herded into a back room. The former president of the casino, the Trump casino in Atlantic City, wrote a 1991 book in which he talked about Donald Trump trying to get him to fire a black accountant, saying he doesn't want blacks to count his money. Saying that blacks are lazy.
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In any one incident, I think there is ambiguity, but where you have pattern for 45 years in the real estate business and the real estate company that Trump headed, then in the casinos, then more recently, we have Trump this year twice retweeting a tweet from white genocide with a photo of the founder of the American Nazi party. I think it is fair to provide some leeway, but over 45 years, you simply see this consistent pattern, and I don't know what else to call what emerges, except racism.
