Why Talib Kweli thinks Donald Trump is a “classic racist”
Donald Trump, whether we like it or not, has been setting the tone of American and global politics for a solid decade now. He is inescapable, a saviour-like figure to his loyal followers and an abomination to those who despise him.
There was a naive sense among many of his detractors during his first administration that Trump was an aberration, a temporary blip in the history of American democracy. This, clearly, has not played out to be true. Returning to the White House in 2025, Trump is very much still with us, finding ever newer and more destructive ways to upset the established order of things.
Having kidnapped the leader of another country, before murdering another and starting a war in that person’s country, the disgraces of Trump’s first stint in charge seem almost quaint in comparison. But Trump, clearly, was a disruptive force in those days, too, and his conduct generated a lot of commentary at the time.
Among the many controversies of that first administration, Trump’s characterisation of El Salvador, Haiti and certain African nations as “shithole countries” was especially distasteful. He was roundly labelled as a bigot in response to his words.
It should come as no surprise that someone like Talib Kweli, famous for his conscious rap and dedication to social justice, agreed with the label. Speaking to Billboard about it in 2018, he called Trump “a classic racist” who is “cut from the old school cloth.”
Trump, he said, is a white man in his 70s, as he was at the time, whose own father “was a billionaire Klansman.” That is in reference to Trump’s dad, Fred, being arrested in 1927 at a Ku Klux Klan demonstration, although the claim that he was actually in the Klan is contentious, as no conclusive evidence of his membership has ever emerged.
In any case, Talib viewed Trump’s racism as distinctly old fashioned. While Trump has long been admired by proponents of the Gamergate and Q-Anon conspiracy theories, which have a particular relationship to racism, Talib believed Trump’s particular beliefs and prejudices were more rooted in an earlier wave of racism.
Trump’s racism, Talib argued, “is based in eugenics and genetics where his type of people is better.” He isn’t a smart person, he went on, but he is “a very privileged man” who isn’t “good at hiding” that fact. “All he knows is racism by default,” the rapper concluded.
Talib acknowledged that the racism of his “shithole countries” comments, while obviously disgraceful, nonetheless don’t represent anything unusual in Trump’s behaviour. He had said and done much worse and gotten away with it, and that fact remains as true today as ever. Talib worried in 2018 about the fact Trump seemed unaccountable for his actions, and, bleakly, his worries have arguably proven to be warranted.