Trump's First Federal Lawsuit Was for Racial Discrimination in Housing. That Was 1973. In 2020 He Killed the Rule Addressing It.

← all posts

The 1973 DOJ complaint was specific. Rental agents employed by Trump Management told Black applicants that no apartments were available on the same days white applicants were being accepted for the same units. Applications from Black prospective tenants were coded with "C" for "colored" to flag them for different treatment. The case covered thousands of apartments across Brooklyn, Queens, and Staten Island — among the largest landlord operations in New York at the time. The Trumps settled in 1975 without admitting guilt. Within two years, the DOJ found they had violated the settlement and filed again.

Donald Trump's response during the 1970s lawsuit set a template for how he would handle accountability for the rest of his life: deny, attack the accusers, and never admit wrongdoing. He hired Roy Cohn — the notoriously aggressive attorney who had served as Joe McCarthy's right-hand man during the Red Scare — to fight the government's discrimination case. Trump counter-sued the DOJ for $100 million, claiming the government was trying to force him to rent to "welfare recipients." The counter-suit was dismissed. The original case resulted in a consent decree requiring Trump Management to advertise vacancies in Black-owned newspapers, to maintain records of every rental applicant's race, and to give the Urban League first referral on available apartments. The company violated the decree within two years, requiring a second settlement in 1978.

The pattern documented in the case — routing Black applicants away from white-majority buildings, accepting white applications while telling Black applicants units were unavailable, maintaining coded records by race — is textbook housing discrimination. It is also illegal under the Fair Housing Act of 1968, which was passed in the final week of Martin Luther King Jr.'s life, one week after his assassination. Fred Trump — Donald's father — was listed as a defendant alongside his son. The Trump family's housing empire had been the subject of prior discrimination complaints dating to the 1950s. The 1973 case was the culmination of a documented pattern, not an isolated incident.

The Affirmatively Furthering Fair Housing rule, eliminated by Trump in 2020, had been designed precisely to address the structural legacy of this kind of discrimination. Under AFFH, local governments receiving federal housing funds were required to analyze segregation patterns in their communities and develop concrete plans to address them — not just promise not to discriminate, but actively work to integrate. The rule was the strongest federal tool for addressing residential segregation since the Fair Housing Act itself. Trump's administration had begun weakening AFFH in 2018; in July 2020, it was formally eliminated.

Trump's framing of the elimination was explicit. He tweeted that he had "just completed a... AFFH Rule that would have allowed Washington bureaucrats to dictate where you live and who your neighbors are" and that "Suburban Lifestyle Dream will be no longer gone!" He was speaking directly to white suburban homeowners about keeping lower-income — by implication, nonwhite — people out of their neighborhoods. The language was not subtle. It was the same argument that had justified housing segregation for a century, dressed in neutral terms. The man who had practiced housing discrimination in the 1970s was, in 2020, using the power of the presidency to dismantle the regulation designed to undo that discrimination's legacy.

In July 2020, Trump tweeted that he was eliminating the Obama-era Affirmatively Furthering Fair Housing rule, which required local governments receiving federal housing funds to actively analyze and address segregation patterns in their communities. He framed its elimination as protecting "the Suburban Lifestyle Dream" and warned that low-income housing would be "permanently placed in your neighborhood" if the rule remained. The explicit framing — protect suburban communities from lower-income, implicitly nonwhite, residents — echoed the same logic that had animated the original housing discrimination 47 years earlier.