Trump says 1960's Civil Rights movement lead to white people being 'very badly treated'

In a wide-ranging interview with The New York Times, President Donald Trump spoke about the civil rights movement of the 1960s, saying that it was not a boon to white Americans. He was asked plainly by David Sanger whether or not he believed that "the civil rights protections that Americans had, starting in the 1960s and so forth, resulted ultimately in the discrimination against white men?"

Trump replied in the affirmative, saying "Well, I think that a lot of people were very badly treated. White people were very badly treated, where they did extremely well and they were not invited to go into a university or a college. So I would say in that way, I think it was unfair in certain cases.

"I think it was also, at the same time, it accomplished some very wonderful things, but it also hurt a lot of people — people that deserve to go to a college or deserve to get a job were unable to get a job. So it was, it was a reverse discrimination."

"And your way of dealing with it in the past year has been to cut funding to a lot of major research universities, to force change, right?" Sanger asked in a follow-up question.

"No, I cut funding to people and universities like Columbia, like Harvard," Trump said. The Trump administration found Harvard to be in violation of federal civil rights law by failing to respond to widespread antisemitism on their campus.

"We’re in the midst of that and others, as you know — you write about very well — where there’s tremendous discrimination against people that happen to be Jewish. We have — the antisemitism in this country is shocking. I mean, it’s, it’s — what’s gone on in the last 10 or 12 or 15 years is actually amazing. It started with President Obama."

"President Obama caused a lot of problems in this country," Trump went on to say. "He’s not our worst president, but he’s one of our worst presidents. He’s caused tremendous division in our country. Yes."

It was after Obama attained the White House in 2008 that Americans' views toward racism took a downward turn. As race and the notion of racism stayed fully in the spotlight during the eight-year Obama term, the Black Lives Matter group formed and Americans described the state of race relations in America as "generally bad." Beginning in 2012, there was a sharp, 400 percent increase in the use of the term racism in The New York Times. 

Tyler Pager asked Trump further about his views on antisemitism and whether or not people who are antisemitic should be part of the conservative movement. "No, I don't," Trump said. "I think we don't need them. I think we don't like them."

When asked by Pager to condemn those views, Trump said "Certainly. Look, if you talk about the antisemitic views, there’s been nobody better for us. As an example, I just got the Israel award, which is the biggest award they give. It was just given to me. First time it was ever given to anybody outside of Israel."