Finding a new angle to attack presidential candidate Donald Trump can be difficult. So much has already been said about his failed personal and business ventures.
With all of this information readily available at our fingertips, the best way to show how Donald Trump would be a terrible president is to talk about what makes you passionate. Show the world how your Democratic values have positively shaped people’s lives.
Then do a little research, because if you spend a couple of minutes looking into Trump’s life, you will discover that there is hardly any sector of American society that Donald Trump has not negatively impacted.
Vice presidential candidate, Tim Kaine, knows this all too well.
In a CNN op-ed posted on August 12, 2016, Kaine highlights his personal history as a fair-housing lawyer. He talks in great detail about an African-American woman named Lorraine who was denied an apartment that was then given to another white tenant.
Kaine firmly believed in Lorraine’s right to equal treatment under the law and took the landlord to court. He knew that this was a textbook case for racial discrimination and won in court handily.
After helping Lorraine, Kaine was determined to make housing discrimination the heart of his legal practice. He has maintained that fervor for equality throughout his public life and has become one of the most ardent advocates for fair-housing on a presidential ticket since Walter Mondale, who wrote the 1968 Fair Housing Act.
In the op-ed, Kaine describes how he and presidential candidate Hillary Clinton will tackle the housing epidemic that is especially hard on poor minorities in oft forgotten areas. Some of these plans include expanding the supply of Low Income Housing Tax Credits, and by creating an initiative to give deserving families up to $10,000 for a down payment on their first home.
After hearing about Kaine’s incredible passion for fair-housing, it is easy to get lost in the wonder of a man who has spent his life fighting for equal justice under the law. But one of the best motivating tools for human beings is anger. And nothing will make you angrier than hearing about Donald Trump’s discriminatory housing practices.
Back in the early 1970s, Donald Trump was a young 20-year-old man helping his father run a rental business that catered to working and middle-class tenants. The Department of Justice filed a discrimination suit against the rental business, claiming that they were racially profiling black tenants and in violation of the Fair Housing Act.
Tim Kaine expertly tied Donald Trump’s fair-housing blunders to his own stellar record by saying:
Around this same time, if a woman like Lorraine attempted to rent an apartment from Trump’s company, federal investigators were told that employees would have added a piece of paper to her rental application with the letter “C” on it. As the Department of Justice would later discover, “C” stood for “Colored.”
Once you get over the shock of Donald Trump’s offensive actions, it is important to be reminded that the same Donald Trump is still around today. He is still attacking people of lower economic means and people of different racial backgrounds, only he is doing it more discreetly and with a larger legal team.
His fake Trump University that took thousands of dollars from the poor and elderly without giving them anything in return, and his refusal to pay Atlantic City workers who helped him build Trump Casinos are just more examples of the types of stunts he was pulling back in the 1970s.
The man has not changed one bit.
And it is up to people like Tim Kaine, who has remained passionate about fair-housing his entire career, to continue to shine the light on how power can be a force of both good and evil. People like Tim Kaine and Hillary Clinton have kept minority issues, children’s issues, and women’s issues at the forefront of their minds and policies throughout their decades of service.
Donald Trump has only asked them to give him money without the promise of anything in return.
Here is a video of Tim Kaine defending Fair-Housing policies on the Senate Floor:
