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This week, former President Donald Trump is facing his second impeachment trial, this time for his role in the failed insurrection at the U.S. Capitol on January 6. And just as some of his Republican colleagues may vote against him in that trial, many of Trumps longtime real estate colleagues have now decided his behaviors in office were too egregious to warrant continued support.

Trumps lender of last resort, Deutsche Bank, is reportedly refusing to do any more business with him or his company, according to The New York Times. Brokerage giant Cushman & Wakefield announced they would no longer handle leasing agreements for Trump properties. The commercial real estate company JLL is no longer handling the sale of the Trump International Hotel in Washington, D.C. Signature Bank, which has also financed Trump projects in the past, closed his accounts and announced they would not do business with any member of Congress who voted not to certify the Electoral College results for the 2020 election. Multiple industry political action committees have suspended donations to those members of Congress as well.

Lenders separation from Trump is a recognition that financial support enabled his anti-democratic behaviors. However, the real estate industry has been complicit in white supremacy and racial discrimination long before Trump took office. Will the repudiation of Trump lead to a wider reckoning?

Land ownership is the primary source of wealth and means to access capital in America. And for over a century, the real estate industry has implicated itself deeply in white supremacy by backing and profiting from racist practices that created and still sustain the nations unequal land and home ownership.

Redlining, racial housing covenants, predatory lending, and neighborhood-destroying highway construction have all contributed to a wealth gap in which white families have roughly10 timesthe net worth of the average Black family.This lack of wealth and ongoing discrimination has throttled Black individuals capacity to acquire, retain, and grow assets that are critical to well-being. For instance, during the last two decades, even as overall U.S. homeownership has grown, there has been a catastrophic loss of homeownership in key cities that have large shares of Black homeowners.

How is this happening in the 21st century? Its been widely documented that the formal association between neighborhood, race, and insurance risk established by the federally backed Home Owners Loan Corporation in the 1930s altered the valuation, market dynamics, and long-term viability of Black neighborhoodsmany of which consequently experienced significant change, ranging from decline to displacement, over the last three generations. This damage has been concretized into neighborhoods in ways large and small. For example, todays appraisal methods and price comparison models extend and reinforce racialized harm because they operate on a comparison basis that assumes a level playing field where there never was one.

Even with the prohibition of overt racial discrimination and oversight, the housing market is structured to disproportionately exclude Black and brown households. For example, our zoning codes and building practices are streamlined to deliver large single-family homes at the urban fringe. Thus, for decades, the very largest houses (four or more bedrooms) have grown as a share of all housing inventory, while smaller configurations have stagnated or declined. Because people of color are farmore likelythan white people to be first-time rather than repeat homebuyers, a mass of housing inventory weighted against attainable starter homes disproportionately favors households with higher concentrations of generational wealth to pay bigger down payments. Over6 millionBlack and brown millennials would be considered mortgage-ready if there were any attainable homes for sale in prime locations.

Meanwhile, todays de facto housing market segregationfinanced by anti-Black lending practicesmakes it possible to target Black and brown communities with predatory loan products while withholding retail amenities. At the same time, Black neighborhoods pay a segregation tax in the form of lower housing values.

White neighborhoods, on the other hand, pay higher housing cost premiums to maintain their exclusiveness. This premium enriches not just the homeowners, but also land speculators, builders, lenders, insurers, and tax jurisdictionsin other words, the real estate industry. The industrys role in eroding Black wealth and profiting from racial division across decades and decades has been much more destructive to our democratic experiment than Trumps four years in office.

So if the real estate industry is reckoning with Trump, it should also address its legacy of discrimination in housing devaluation, lower rates of homeownership, and higher interest rates among Black and brown homebuyers. In divesting from these formal and informal white supremacist systems, the industry can instead invest in historically disenfranchised people and places, including through reasonable protections for renters and new programs, policies, and models that expand Black and brown property ownership.

On January 6, Donald Trump attacked the legitimacy of American democracy. The real estate industrys divestment from him is a start, but does not begin to address the entirety of the anti-democratic and racially biased real estate ecosystem. To truly advance democracy, the real estate industry must divest from white supremacy and develop anti-racist systems that encourage both integration and inclusion.

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The real estate industry is divesting from Donald Trumpbut divesting from white supremacy requires more - Brookings Institution

President Joe Biden is so over his predecessor.

Im tired of talking about Donald Trump, he saidduring Tuesday nights town hall event in Milwaukee. I dont want to talk about him anymore.

He said it twice during the event, including when asked about Trumps second impeachment acquittal.

Look, for four years all thats been in the news is Trump, Biden explained. The next four years I want to make sure all the news is the American people.

True to that sentiment, Biden referred to Trump only as the former guy at another point.

Based on the reaction on social media, the president is hardly alone in the desire to move on:

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Joe Biden Finally Says What A Lot Of People Are Thinking About Donald Trump - HuffPost

Throughout Trump's campaign for president and the four years in the White House, he and those closest to him repeatedly sought to obfuscate about his overall health -- setting new lows in the standards of transparency for our chief executive in the process.

When Trump tested positive for Covid-19 in October 2020, it was virtually impossible to get a straight answer about his condition out of anyone in the White House -- including White House physician Sean Conley.

Conley repeatedly gave rosy assessments of Trump's health while battling the disease, conveniently parsing words to avoid acknowledging what we now know (and long suspected): This was a very serious health crisis for Trump.

"I was trying to reflect the upbeat attitude that the team, the President in his course of illness has had. I didn't want to give any information that might steer the course of illness in another direction, and in doing so it came off that we're trying to hide something."

Which tells you everything you need to know about Conley -- and the approach to Trump's health he and the White House team took. What difference does the desire to "reflect the upbeat attitude of the team [and] the president," have on Trump's condition? And why would Conley providing accurate information about Trump's condition "steer the course of illness in another direction"? Short answer: It wouldn't.

That Trump's condition was even more dire than we knew, then, isn't surprising. A lack of transparency -- and Trump's desire to always be perceived as strong and, uh, manly -- was a feature, not a glitch, of the Trump White House.

Knowing the full picture of a President's health -- whether that President is Trump or Joe Biden or whoever comes after Biden -- is a public right. Being purposely misinformed or given very limited information for public relations reasons should not be excused. Or repeated.

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Of course Donald Trump's team didn't tell the truth about his Covid-19 illness - CNN

Yet we too are sticking to a script, as celebrants in the impeachment managers bid to win the hearts and minds of jurors who have not shown ownership of either. Mr. Trump may have railed against it and had his surrogates fight it, but the trial has given a new spotlight to an attention addict whose rehab was not going well. He is not there, but this is still The Impeachment of Donald J. Trump, about Donald J. Trump, featuring applause for Donald J. Trump, and starring Donald J. Trump as Donald J. Trump. His ego and his coffers need you to watch, to tweet, to rage.

So do you not watch, to enlarge the collective spiting of him? Do you give oxygen to an amoral human torch? The Resistance did not create or empower Mr. Trump. But we did make the classic first mistake of concluding that our insights, analysis and morality would convince his supporters that they were tragically wrong. When that failed, we made the classic second mistake of assuming we hadnt made our first mistake loudly or clearly enough. Im not ready to believe that we started it, but I, for one, have gotten loud and blasphemous enough to peel the paint off my walls.

Still, we cannot underestimate the power of righteous and organic hatred to overwhelm everything else. It is hard to fathom now, but in the epic sitcom All in the Family, one of the best running jokes consisted entirely of Carroll OConnors Archie Bunker getting in the face of Bea Arthurs Maude Findlay and announcing the identity of the worst president in history. He would elongate it and he would mispronounce it and when he would intone Fraaaaanklin. Delllllano. Roooooooosevelt!; she would erupt in paroxysms of liberal rage at his heresy.

These political passion plays were performed some 25 years after Roosevelt died, and were thus a real-time testament to something the half century since has erased: Beloved and revered as he may have been, F.D.R. was also passionately hated and blamed, and his memory alone could start political fistfights into at least the 1970s.

One wonders if the visceral hatred of Mr. Trump will end that soon. Or if it ever will.

Just as I have far more history with Mr. Trump than I would have wished, I also have some standing on the subject of people consuming political Soylent that they clearly dont like, dont want to see, and dont want to eat.

At roughly this time of year in 1998, I was at the Super Bowl on assignment for NBC and also doing a week of celebrity-themed shows for my little niche, boutique, offbeat news hour on MSNBC. We were all set up to interview John Lithgow in front of the refrigerator in the kitchen set of Third Rock From the Sun when my producer advised there had been a slight change in plans: I would instead be interviewing Tim Russert via satellite from Washington, because the president might be resigning over his relationship with Monica Lewinsky.

Our audience first doubled, then trebled. The heady, news-packed and unpredictable early days of the show we subtly renamed White House in Crisis made for compelling viewing. Then came an enormous cloud of the kind of illogic which may apply to whatever follows Mr. Trumps second impeachment trial.

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Opinion | Is This the End of Obsessively Hating Donald Trump? - The New York Times

For the former prime minister Theresa May, one of the most pressing matters she confronted during her encounter with Donald Trump a few days after his inauguration went beyond mere diplomacy.

May had travelled to Washington in 2017 with the intention of persuading the new US president to make a supportive statement about Nato. Little did she expect that she would be calling her husband, Philip, to warn him that images of the US president of holding her hand as they walked through the White House would soon be flashing around the world.

With Trump out of power, those who had ringside seats during four years of dangerous and often chaotic foreign policy are now describing their often bruising encounters in a major new documentary series.

The three-part BBC series, Trump Takes on the World, by the award-winning documentary maker Norma Percy, reveals extraordinary access to key observers of the president.

With testimony from a whos who of world leaders and senior US officials, it offers an unmediated reflection of Trump shorn of political hypocrisies.

It was not just May who found Trump unsettling: to European diplomatic observers, he seemed a strange creature. And he also triggered alarm among some American officials in the room with him, with one defence official noting that the presidents notoriously short attention span suggested a squirrel careening through the traffic.

Mays encounter with Trump, which is described to Percy by British aides as well as Trump insiders, was a taste of what was to come. May was seen as not strong by Trump, according to KT McFarland, the former US deputy national security adviser. But the prime minister had gone into the meeting determined to persuade the president to make a statement backing Nato and warn him over his closeness to Vladimir Putin.

The meeting took a bizarre twist as they walked through the White House.

He held her hand going through the colonnades, which took us all by surprise, and as it turns out, took Theresa by surprise, Fiona McLeod Hill, the former joint chief of staff at No 10, told Percy.

She couldnt really take her hand back, so she was stuck And the first thing she said [afterwards] was I need to call Philip just to let him know that Ive been holding hands with another man before it hits the media.

Before May had the opportunity to call her husband, Trump hosted her for lunch, where another boundary-shattering episode was waiting. First May was treated to the full bloom one of Trumps stream-of-consciousness rants, described by Thomas Shannon, then US undersecretary for political affairs, as running the gamut from his own inauguration to his disdain for the press.

Then, keen to raise the issue of Putin, May asked Trump if he had spoken to the Russian leader, which Trump denied. At that point, however, Trumps chief of staff intervened to tell the president that Putin had actually called, but not been put through.

Hill takes up the story of the toe-curling outburst. Trump at this point looks not orange but red. He flipped. Furious. In front of May, he scolded his advisers in what Shannon recalled as an unseemly moment. He said: Youre telling me that Vladimir Putin called the White House and youre only telling me now during this lunch? Vladimir Putin is the only man in the world who can destroy the United States and I didnt take his call.

May was far from alone in being exposed to Trumps flagrant disregard for boundaries.

From his unilateral withdrawals from the Iranian nuclear treaty and the Paris climate accord to his dealings with the Palestinians, Russia and China, few even those close to him could ever fully grasp the extent of his unpredictability or his disdain for detail.

The former Australian prime minister Malcolm Turnbull was thrown off balance by Trumps behaviour during an encounter at a G20 meeting in Hamburg also in 2017.

Like May, Turnbull had important issues on his mind, in this case steel tariffs. Taking his chance, Turnbull collared Trump, who was obsessing about something else. Donald said: Malcolm, do you want to see my SCIF? It is so cool. I had no idea what he was talking about. I thought he was talking about a boat [a skiff]. We turned around a corner and there was this big steel box about the size of a shipping container.

Trump pulled Turnbull into what turned out to be a sensitive compartmented information facility, an ultra-secure communications hub, with the new French president, Emmanuel Macron, also in tow.

He said: This is so cool when youre in there, nobody can hear you, not even the Chinese. Its so secret.

Expectations of Trump from European leaders were not so much low as non-existent. For the former French president Franois Hollande, who dealt with Trump only briefly, an early red flag was raised when the US leader asked him in all earnestness who he should appoint to his team in the White House. I thought he was just being courteous; it was pretty outrageous. Imagine I phoned Obama and said: You know France well, who should I appoint as an adviser? Later, briefing his successor Macron during the transition, Hollande was clear how he regarded the US leader sentiments Percy herself regards as a summing up how many foreign leaders viewed the Trump era.

I said to [Macron], Hollande recalls, dont expect anything from Donald Trump. Do not think youll be able to change his mind. Dont think that its possible to turn him or seduce him. Dont imagine that he wont follow through with his own agenda.

Some friends asked me why I was doing it, said Percy, who has made the documentaries The Death of Yugoslavia, End of Empire and Watergate, and who filmed the new series under lockdown. The view was that we knew what Trump was like. He was on the news every night. But this is the inside story of those who had to deal with him.

Trump Takes on the World begins on Wednesday at 9pm on BBC Two

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How Donald Trump's hand-holding led to panicky call home by Theresa May - The Guardian