“[Kamala Harris] was always of Indian heritage and she was always promoting Indian heritage. I didn’t know she was Black until a number of years ago when she happened to turn Black and now she wants to be known as Black. So I don’t know: is she Indian or is she Black?”
Donald Trump asked that last Thursday to the National Association of Black Journalists in Chicago.
His question then begs mine now: Is Donald Trump white?
He’s mixed nationality for sure, part Scottish and part German. And less than 100 years ago Germans viewed themselves as “The Master Race”.
Wikipedia’s history of the Trump family says they descended from an itinerant lawyer in Germany in 1608.
In 1885, Trump’s grandfather, Friedrich Trump, emigrated from Bavaria to the US at age 16. He anglicized his name to Frederick in 1892 when he became a U.S. citizen.
During the Klondike Gold Rush, he amassed a fortune by opening a restaurant and hotel in Bennett, B.C., and later Whitehorse.
One biographer wrote that his business included a brothel, a portrayal Donald Trump has said was “totally false.”
When Frederick Trump tried to return to Germany in 1905, he was denied because he’d skipped out on his mandatory military service there.
“This German heritage was long concealed by Donald Trump’s father, Fred Trump, who had grown up in a mainly German-speaking environment until he was ten years old; after World War II and until the 1980s, Trump told people he was of Swedish ancestry.”
So for years, he wasn’t German, and then suddenly he was: in 1998 he said he is “proud” of his German heritage, and served as grand marshal of the 1999 German-American Steuben Parade in New York City.
Donald’s mother was also an immigrant.
Born Mary Anne MacLeod in 1912 in a small village in the Hebrides of Scotland, she came to America at age 17. She started life there as a dirt-poor servant escaping the even worse poverty of her native land. In1938, she met and later married a property developer, Fred Trump, and became a U.S. citizen in 1942.
While visiting Scotland in June 2008, Donald Trump said, “I think I do feel Scottish.”
Which goes to show, as Barack Obama once said: “A lot of shelter dogs are mutts like me.”
Meanwhile…
1. Love Stories. They’re quick and moving on Instagram…from the perils of fame and the need for mundane things, to coming out and rich people. Oh….and here are some people not to fall in love with.
2. Ensuring good health. First, pre-authorization for medical treatments is ‘ethically nuts’. Next, red meat is tied to higher dementia risk. So how does baking handbagsbecome healthy for everyone? And…Kamala on cancer.
3. Ali Velshi tackles Trump, Harris, America and the world. Who better to decipher the U.S. election than Ali Velshi, MSNBC’s Chief Correspondent? Every day from his anchor desk in New York he analyses not just the race, but the consequences of whether Harris or Trump will win on November 5.
So join us for the RamsayTalk on October 15 as Ali Velshi offers his take on the most important election for Canada in decades – and discusses his new book, Small Acts of Courage, his own multi-racial family’s story. You can buy tickets here before the Koerner Hall box office opens to the public on August 12 at 10 a.m. ET.
**NB: All ticket holders need an account on rcmusic.ca in order to access the presale. An account is free to set up, and it will give you the option to enter the promo code after you sign into an account. Use promo code OGBLOG.
4. Take your next vacation in sunny…Afghanistan. A reputable company is still running trips there, including weekend getaways and this-last minute one in September.
If you’re into taking the train, Wes Anderson has reimagined the British Pullman. Plus 10 facts about the London Tube, including that during World War II the Piccadilly Line was used to store treasures from The British Museum.
5. Some of my best friends are zoo-ish. Especially now that The Toronto Zoo turns 50 next Thursday. Led by the kinetic Dolf DeJong, it’s the 6th largest zoo on earth, bigger than Moscow’s and smaller than Beijing’s, with 5,000 animals over 710 acres and 1.3 million visitors a year. Go Tigers! Go Polar Bears!
6. The perils of both-sideism. The habit of reducing the world into two perspectives and treating the two as fundamentally alike, makes everything morally equivalent. It leads to Donald Trump defending Neo-Nazis as one group of “very fine people on both sides.” No wonder America’s so polarized, and Canada polarizing.
7. Puzzling Prizes. First, the world jigsaw puzzle championship. What takes us hours and often entire long weekends takes Alejandro Clemente León less than 38 minutes.
Next, Toronto’s Glenn Gould Foundation awarded its 14th Glenn Gould Prize last week to Maestro Gustavo Dudamel, the incoming conductor of the New York Philharmonic, at a ceremony at Carnegie Hall where Dudamel conducted the National Children’s Symphony of Venezuela, the orchestra from which he famously emerged, and the birthplace also of the global music-education program, El Sistema.
Question: The awardee gets $100,000 and there’s a $25,000 protégé prize given to a young artist of exceptional promise. But perhaps Dudamel doesn’t need the $100,000. He made $2.8 million last year. Nor do previous winners like YoYo Ma, Yehudi Menuhin, Jessye Norman and Philip Glass. Why not let the awardee give five $25,000 Protégé awards? Same cost to the Gould Foundation; five times the knock-on effect.
8. Weird world. First, a weird (and hugely successful) fisherman. Next, a weird (and hugely successful) reaction to stress. Next, weird that no one knows what a Canadian Tuxedo is. Next, a man gives birth in Newfoundland. Next, Toronto wins an odd first.Finally, and of course, Weird Donald Trump.
9. Sudden Russian Death Syndrome. Being part of noblesse russe will not save your hide these days. This chart and podcast explain the origins of this growing malady.
Meanwhile, last week’s biggest ever prisoner-swap between Russia and the West saw a married couple of sleeper agents living in Slovenia with their young kids, and arrested by Slovenian authorities, returned home to Moscow. The kids only learned they were Russian when mom and dad told them on the flight home. Neither speaks Russian.
This is the opposite of the kids of the Soviet sleeper agents living in Washington in the hit series, The Americans. The kids found out and were…not happy. The Americans was based on the 2010 arrest of a ring of actual Russian sleeper agents in the U.S.
10. New views of…The loneliest prisoner in the SuperMax, America’s most secure prison….When you love to travel but hate to fly…how to win an argument and luxury beliefs and Mexican workers, the All-Blacks Haka, and Starlink Mini.
11. What I’m liking: A book about the largest sting in history. You’re a professional criminal, so you buy an encrypted phone. Then you and thousands of colleagues the world over, discover that the company that sells your encrypted phones is owned by the…FBI.
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ON SEPTEMBER 23, TANYA TALAGA STANDS CANADA’S PAST ON ITS HEAD. BE THERE.
The Knowing reshapes our sense of Canada in a way only Tanya Talaga can.
The famed Anishinaabe journalist and Massey Lecturer reveals how all-embracing our mistreatment of our founding people was, and offers a way forward to real reconciliation.
Big new ideas like hers are rarely comfortable, and The Knowing is the big new book of the year. So it deserves a big hall to hear what’s vital to us all.
Tanya will also be interviewed by Mark Sakamoto, author of Forgiveness: A Gift from My Grandparents. 
Date: Monday, September 23, 2024
Time: 7:00 p.m. to 8:30 p.m. (Doors open at 6:30 p.m) ET
Place: Koerner Hall, 273 Bloor St. West, Toronto, just west of the ROM
TICKETS HERE
Please pass this invitation on to like-minded friends and family.
Cheers,
Bob Ramsay
In partnership with
