Donald Trump, the presumptive Republican nominee for president of the United States, tells Breitbart News he plans to continue the rich GOP tradition of standing up for women’s and civil rights in the face of opposition from Democrats.
He also says he plans to help the Republican Party, which led the way on ending slavery, the Civil Rights movement and women’s suffrage and women’s rights—among other big picture moral leadership causes in American history—take more credit for its victories for women’s and civil rights while fighting Democrats who opposed those measures.
“You’re right—100 percent,” Trump told Breitbart News when asked about how the Republican Party led the way on ending slavery, the Civil Rights movement and women’s suffrage.
On Tuesday night, when now presumptive Democratic nominee Hillary Clinton assumed the leadership of that party, she whitewashed the Democratic Party’s history of racism, sexism, support for slavery and long history of standing against civil rights for all in America. In fact, as the first woman to win the presidential nomination of a major political party in America, Clinton attempted to align herself with the Seneca Falls convention of 1848, the first ever women’s rights convention organized in large part by Elizabeth Cady Stanton.
“Tonight’s victory is not about one person,” Clinton said in her speech accepting her role as the Democratic Party’s presumptive presidential nominee.
It belongs to generations of women and men who struggled and sacrificed and made this moment possible. In our country, it started right here in New York, a place called Seneca Falls, in 1848. When a small but determined group of women, and men, came together with the idea that women deserved equal rights, and they set it forth in something called the Declaration of Sentiments, and it was the first time in human history that that kind of declaration occurred.
Clinton did not mention Cady Stanton, or the fact that the women’s rights leader went on to become one of the nation’s first Republicans. In fact, Stanton’s husband Henry Brewster Stanton—a journalist and a New York State senator—was one of the nation’s leading voices for the abolition of slavery and helped found the Republican Party in New York back in 1856.
Later in the speech, Clinton took a shot at Trump, arguing that he wanted to send America backward—that his trademark campaign phrase “Make America Great Again” was code for taking the country back before all people had civil rights.
“Donald Trump is temperamentally unfit to be president and commander-in-chief,” Clinton said. “And he’s not just trying to build a wall between America and Mexico – he’s trying to wall off Americans from each other. When he says, ‘Let’s make America great again,’ that is code for, ‘Let’s take America backwards.’ Back to a time when opportunity and dignity were reserved for some, not all, promising his supporters an economy he cannot recreate.”
Never mind the fact that her own husband, former President Bill Clinton, used the phrase “Make America Great Again” multiple times back in the 1990s—a phrase first popularized by former President Ronald Reagan, who used the campaign slogan in his own successful 1980 White House bid—but Clinton is forgetting the history of her own political party. Clinton’s success is built out of a Democratic Party that rose to and clutched onto power by actively suppressing equal rights of not just women, but minorities as well.
Abraham Lincoln, the president who signed the Emancipation Proclamation abolishing slavery then led the country through the Civil War preserving the Union until his assassination, was a Republican. The general public often forgets how influential the Republican Party was in ending slavery—Democrats wanted to continue slavery, while Lincoln’s Republicans wanted to end it—and if it weren’t for the GOP, slavery would not have ended and the Union itself may have fallen apart.
“Some may not realize that the modern Republican Party owes its origin to the fight over slavery nearly two centuries ago,” CNN’s Tom Foreman wrote back in 2012.
In the tumultuous mid-1800s, right before the Civil War, some political activists were concerned about keeping slavery from spreading into new western territories, and they saw no way to stop it through existing political powers: the Democrats and the Whigs (the pro-Congress party of the mid 1800s that largely destroyed itself in the 1852 elections in a battle over slavery). So they formed a new party, taking the name ‘Republicans’ in a salute to earlier American politicians.
As Republicans led the battle against slavery, in 1861 the party’s first U.S. president—Abraham Lincoln—was elected.
“Soon after, slavery fell,” Foreman wrote.
The Whig party disappeared. And the Republicans began a long steady rise in power. Even back then, the party liked to talk about fiscal responsibility — immigration, religion — and the need for a strong business climate. All of this spurred a sympathetic Chicago newspaper to call the Republicans the Grand Old Party, or the GOP.
Republicans have led the way on every major civil rights movement in American history—ending slavery was hardly the only one. What is now the Party of Trump also led the way in granting women the right to vote. Elizabeth Cady Stanton, a leader in the women’s rights movement in the 19th Century, was a Republican, as was Susan B. Anthony. So were many of the others involved in the effort. In fact, it was Republicans who led the effort for decades that eventually saw passage of the 19th Amendment to the U.S. Constitution—which granted women the right vote.
“Most educated Americans vaguely remember that the amendment granting women the right to vote was passed by Congress in 1919 and ratified by the states in 1920,” the American Spectator’s David Catron wrote back in 2012.
But the number of people who know anything about the forty-year legislative war that preceded that victory is smaller than the audience of MSNBC. That war began in 1878, when a California Republican named A.A. Sargent introduced the 19th Amendment only to see it voted down by a Democrat-controlled Congress. It finally ended four decades later, when the Republicans won landslide victories in the House and the Senate, giving them the power to pass the amendment despite continued opposition from most elected Democrats — including President Woodrow Wilson, to whom the suffragettes frequently referred as “Kaiser Wilson.”
Catron continued by noting that Republicans in Utah—Mormons—granted women the right to vote back in 1870. Then, for years afterwards, Republicans—facing objections from Democrats—over and over again introduced the 19th Amendment for ratification in Congress. Meanwhile, Republican states granted women the right to vote in many other places.
“Meanwhile, the Republicans continued to introduce the 19th Amendment in Congress every year, but the Democrats were able to keep it bottled up in various committees for another decade before allowing either chamber to vote on it,” Catron wrote.
In 1887 it finally reached the floor of the Senate. Once again, however, it was defeated by a vote of 34 to 16. After this setback, advocates of women’s suffrage opted to put pressure on Congress by convincing various state legislatures to pass bills giving women the vote. This met with some success. By the turn of the century a variety of Republican-controlled states, including Wyoming, Colorado, and Idaho, had granted women suffrage. During the first ten years of the new century, several other states gave women the vote, including Washington and California.
Eventually, Democrats relented and Republicans succeeded in granting women’s suffrage nationally.
“Congress, however, didn’t deign to vote on the issue again until 1914, when it was once again defeated by Senate Democrats,” Catron added.
It was subsequently brought up for a vote in January of 1915 in the House, where it went down by a vote of 204 to 174. Nonetheless, the Republicans continued to push even after it was defeated yet again in early 1918. The big break for 19th Amendment came when President Wilson, a true Democrat, violated his most solemn campaign promise. Having pledged to keep the United States out of the European conflict that had been raging since 1914, he decided to enter the war anyway. This set the stage for the 1918 midterm elections in which voter outrage swept the Republicans into power in both the House and the Senate. This finally placed the GOP in a position to pass the amendment despite Democrat opposition.
Later in the 20th Century of course, during the Civil Rights Movement, Democrats again stood against equal rights for all Americans regardless of race or gender. Writing in the Guardian of the landmark 1964 Civil Rights Act back in 2013, Harry Enten detailed how the Democratic Party opposed civil rights efforts while Republicans backed them.
“80% of Republicans in the House and Senate voted for the bill. Less than 70% of Democrats did,” Enten wrote. “Indeed, Minority Leader Republican Everett Dirksen led the fight to end the filibuster. Meanwhile, Democrats such as Richard Russell of Georgia and Strom Thurmond of South Carolina tried as hard as they could to sustain a filibuster.”
In fact, a PBS special on “The Rise and Fall of Jim Crow” detailed how systemic racism was embedded into the very fabric of what has now become Hillary Clinton’s Democratic Party.
“The Democratic Party identified itself as the ‘white man’s party’ and demonized the Republican Party as being ‘Negro dominated,’ even though whites were in control,” the PBS special writes on its website of the post-Civil War Democrats. “Determined to re-capture the South, Southern Democrats ‘redeemed’ state after state — sometimes peacefully, other times by fraud and violence. By 1877, when Reconstruction was officially over, the Democratic Party controlled every Southern state.”
The PBS special goes on even further to detail how even Northern Democrats tolerated the overt discrimination and racism from their Southern brethren so as to keep their coalition of power together. “The South remained a one-party region until the Civil Rights movement began in the 1960s. Northern Democrats, most of whom had prejudicial attitudes towards blacks, offered no challenge to the discriminatory policies of the Southern Democrats,” PBS writes.
A deeper more than 30-page report from the American Civil Rights Union (ACRU)—called “The Truth About Jim Crow”—details how the Democratic Party was integral to the development of such laws.
“Jim Crow’s political purpose was to keep the white population in power, and the Democratic Party thought of itself as the white man’s party,” one part of the more than 10-page-long section on how the Democratic Party pushed Jim Crow laws reads. “A chronological look at the Jim Crow era will illustrate how Democrats created and exploited Jim Crow.”
The report goes on to detail how it was Republicans who ended Jim Crow laws.
Trump, in his latest exclusive interview with Breitbart News, said that Clinton’s rewriting of her Democratic Party’s sordid history on these important narratives is more proof that she is just playing the woman card and the race card for pure political gain—and in opposition of the facts. He also believes that Republicans need to do more to take credit for the party’s leading role in the women’s rights, Civil Rights and slavery abolition movements—all movements the Democrats, the party of Clinton, originally fought against intensely.
“The Democrats have always played that card,” Trump said. “The Republicans have not taken enough credit for what’s taken place. They’ve never taken enough credit for what’s taken place.”
Trump told Breitbart News that he plans to win support across the country despite anyone’s particular race, and aims to seek support from Hispanics and African Americans and white voters alike—and men and women—using the same message delivered to each of them the same way, equally: Jobs and economic opportunity for all. Meanwhile, Clinton, of course, is going to use these race and gender issues to divide Americans into separate classes based on gender and skin color.
“I plan to help Hispanics and African Americans because I’m going to bring jobs back to the country,” Trump said.
She doesn’t know how. I’m going to rebuild the infrastructure of the country, she wouldn’t know where to start. That’s why a lot of the unions, the head people, they routinely endorse the Democrats. Routinely. And they’re having a hard time. Because while they’re dying to endorse the Democrats because that’s where their head people have their lunch and dinner, their membership wants to endorse Trump. Look at the Teamsters. The people within the Teamsters want Trump. They haven’t endorsed yet, and the reason they haven’t endorsed yet is because everybody in the Teamsters wants Trump. The reason they want Trump is because I’m going to rebuild the infrastructure of the country and that’s good for them. It appeals across the lines to people that have small businesses and contracting companies that are not unionized.
When asked about how—when those self-appointed leaders in the African American and Hispanic communities will certainly further the Democratic Party’s agenda and undermine the GOP’s efforts, facts be damned—he plans to get his message out to the actual voters, Trump said it is simple.
“I think that’s been my whole message up to this point,” Trump said. “I’m going to continue to hit it very hard. But I think it’s been very much my own message up to this point, jobs, good trade deals. Last night I talked about it. Great trade deals.”
There are some early signs that Trump—using his unique style of mixing interesting campaigning with his celebrity appeal—might be able to cut through the clutter and reach voters in African American and Hispanic communities that have for years now been outside the GOP’s grasp, despite the Democratic Party’s dark history on civil and women’s rights matters.
As noted by Fox News Latino, Trump’s support among Hispanics is spiking fast according to new data from analytics firm CulturIntel. In fact, he is almost equal with Clinton.
“Based on big data analysis over the last 30 days as of June 1st, Trump reports 37 percent of Hispanic positive sentiment versus 41 percent for Clinton,” CulturIntel writes in the report. “Surprisingly, the candidates tie in negative sentiment across Hispanics at 38 percent; discounting the fact that Latinos default as Democrats or are completely turned off by Trump’s off-color comments. After all, over 50 percent of Latinos identify as political independents.”
Meanwhile, as Gateway Pundit notes in a new report as well based off this and other data, Trump could be on par to win 25 percent of the black vote. It would, the report detailed, lead to a landslide victory for Trump in November. It would also be the first time since 1960, when Richard Nixon failed to beat John F. Kennedy for the presidency before coming back eight years later to win in 1968, that a Republican won such a big percentage of the non-white vote. With black unemployment rates double what they are for whites, according to the latest data from the Bureau of Labor Statistics, if Trump hammers his jobs message—and corrects the record on Democrats versus Republicans when it comes to civil rights—maybe he could cut into a significant portion of the black electorate.
On top of all of this, as Breitbart News previously reported in an earlier part of this interview, Trump is also zoning in one place where failed 2012 GOP presidential former Massachusetts Gov. Mitt Romney did not succeed: proving to voters he cares about them.
He said in this interview that he believes that to run the country, a president must “manage with heart”—a sign that he is appealing to the significant portion of the electorate that looks for a president who cares about people like them, qualifications be damned.
While Trump paints Clinton as “Heartless Hillary,” his second nickname for who he also calls “Crooked Hillary,” he could be growing the GOP tent and expanding the electorate based off key analytics that establishment Republicans in Washington, D.C., hellbent on amnesty for illegal aliens and jailbreak style “criminal justice reform” crime bills have completely missed.