OAN’s Brooke Mallory
6:12 PM – Tuesday, June 27, 2023
Former President Donald Trump is the only president living, past or present, whose family cannot be tied to slave ownership, according to a recent report.
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The outlet Reuters, which politically leans center-left, claimed that Jimmy Carter, George W. Bush, and Bill Clinton were all born from ancestors who had a slave-owning past.
Former President Obama, the United States’ first Black president, can also trace his family’s slave-owning ancestors down to one individual on his White mother’s side of the family who had reportedly subjugated two humans.
The Reuters report claimed that Supreme Court Justices Amy Coney Barrett and Neil Gorsuch, as well as at least 100 U.S. political leaders, are also descended from enslavers. According to the outlet’s research, 36% of congressional members, both Republicans and Democrats, can trace their ancestors back to slaveholders.
The Trumps had landed in the U.S. after slavery was already abolished.
The History Channel reported that Trump’s ancestor, Friedrich Trump, who was described as a feeble young man unsuitable for hard labor and who desired to escape Germany’s military, crossed the Atlantic in 1885 to begin his family’s legacy. Slavery had been abolished by the 13th Amendment twenty years earlier.
According to Reuters, two other Republican candidates running against Trump for the GOP nomination in 2024, former Arkansas Governor Asa Hutchinson and North Dakota Governor Doug Burgum, both hail from slave-owning ancestors.
The Reuters investigation revealed how deeply America was linked to the institution of slavery in the past, including through the “people who make the laws that govern our country,” according to Henry Louis Gates Jr., a Harvard University professor who studies African and African American research and the host of PBS’s “Finding Your Roots.”
Gates Jr. said that these discoveries “tie the past to the present.”
“It’s just to say: Look at how closely linked we are to the institution of slavery and how it informed the lives of the ancestors of people who represent us in the United States Congress today,” he told Reuters.
However, Gates Jr. also warned that the researchers’ links should not be viewed as “another chapter in the blame game.”
“We do not inherit guilt for our ancestors’ actions,” he continued.
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By: OAN
