Yes, we have yet another very bad story about Donald Trump today. The hits keep coming.
What did the Republican presidential nominee do when his Atlantic City casino business faced competition from a Native American tribe?
Trump secretly funded a "pro-family" dogwhistle ad campaign on local radio and newspapers that warned residents that the St. Regis tribe of Mohawk Indians would bring a wave of crime to New York which, at the time, was the closet rival to his Atlantic City casino business.
From the Los Angeles Times:
They came from the New York Institute for Law and Society, a new self-described grass-roots anti-gambling group targeting the St. Regis Mohawks. Its campaign in 2000, supposedly supported by 12,000 “pro-family” donors, warned of the evils an Indian casino would bring: “increased crime, broken families, bankruptcies and, in the case of the Mohawks, violence.”
But there were no 12,000 donors. Virtually all the money for the campaign, more than $1 million, came from Donald Trump.
I would call this an astroturf campaign except those typically feature people paid to appear and protest at events in favor of a particular industry
In this case, there was little more than a paper trail leading back to Trump and his fake anti-gambling group he created to protect his own gambling business.
There's more to the story. This fake anti-gambling group was created by Trump's ally Roger Stone who you may recognize as a former frequent guest on CNN and Alex Jones' current BFF.
The institute was the brainchild of Trump’s longtime lobbyist and consultant, Roger Stone, and Trump himself was hands-on — not just paying the bills, but signing off on ad copy or radio scripts depicting the tribe as violent criminals and drug dealers. When Stone hired private investigators to dig up dirt on the Mohawks, Trump secretly paid the bills.
As it turns out, what Trump and Stone did was actually illegal and Trump was forced to pay a $250,000 fine for failing to register as a lobbyist before running this campaign.
This may be the most blatantly racist thing Trump has ever done, but who knows what else we'll see.