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An Internet meme circulating in August 2016 paired two racially charged statements previously attributed separately to Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump: While neither attribution was new, the conjunction of the two statements created the impression that Trump must have at some time opined that no black person would be President of the United States again any time soon because laziness is a trait in blacks. There is a public record of Donald Trump's having stated, more or less, that no black person would be president again any time soon because of the poor performance of his predecessor in the White House, Barack Obama: When called upon to explain the statement in a 2 August 2015 interview with Jonathan Karl on ABC News' This Week, Trump offered: A source attributing the statement Laziness is a trait in blacks to Donald Trump dates to the early 1990s. It should be noted, however, that that source was a book written by a disgruntled former employee of Trump Plaza Hotel & Casino, John R. O'Donnell, and neither the statement nor the sentiment behind it has been corroborated elsewhere. As one might expect, O'Donnell's account, Trumped!, paints an unflattering portrait of its subject overall but offers this anecdote specifically as evidence of Trump's low opinion of the African Americans in his employ: Although Trump didn't deny any of O'Donnell's specific allegations in a subsequent (1997)Playboy magazine interview -- The stuff O’Donnell wrote about me is probably true, Trump said at the time -- he vehemently denied O'Donnell's account of the conversation when asked about it during a 24 October 1999 interview with Tim Russert on Meet the Press: As the Washington Post noted, it is, at best, a secondhand quote from a private conversation, written down years after the fact, and should be viewed with some skepticism.
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