Joe Biden calls Donald Trump the country’s ‘first’ racist president
Joe Biden has claimed that Donald Trump was America’s ‘first’ racist president.
Joe Biden has claimed that Donald Trump was America’s “first” racist president.
The presumptive Democratic presidential nominee’s comments on Thursday (AEST) were made during a virtual town hall organised by the Service Employees International Union.
When a questioner claimed racism had engulfed the coronavirus outbreak and mentioned the President referring to it as the “China virus”, the former vice-president responded by blasting Mr Trump and “his spread of racism”.
“The way he deals with people based on the colour of their skin, their national origin, where they’re from, is absolutely sickening,” Mr Biden said. “No sitting president has ever done this. Never, never, never. No Republican president has done this. No Democratic president. We’ve had racists, and they’ve existed. They’ve tried to get elected president. He’s the first one that has.”
Mr Biden also claimed that Mr Trump was using race “as a wedge” to distract from his handling of the pandemic.
Many US presidents — including the first, George Washington — owned slaves. Woodrow Wilson, the country’s 28th president, is having his name removed from Princeton University’s public policy school after protests against institutional racism and police brutality. Wilson, who served 1913-21, supported segregation and imposed it on several agencies.
At a White House briefing later Wednesday, Mr Trump responded to a question about Mr Biden’s comments by pointing to his administration’s efforts passing criminal justice reform legislation and expanding opportunity zones, as well as the low unemployment numbers for minority groups before the coronavirus outbreak.
“I’ve done more for Black Americans than anybody with the possible of exception of Abraham Lincoln,” he said. “Nobody has even been close.”
Katrina Pierson, a senior adviser for Mr Trump’s re-election campaign, said that “no one should take lectures on racial justice from Joe Biden”.
Mr Biden has vowed that, if elected, he will begin addressing institutional racism within his first 100 days of taking office. This was not the first time he’s suggested Mr Trump’s actions were racist.
He has built his campaign around the election being a “battle for the soul of the nation” and says he felt compelled to run after he saw Mr Trump respond to a deadly 2017 white supremacist attack on counter-protesters in Charlottesville, Virginia, by saying there were “some very fine people” on both sides. When Mr Trump said last year that four Democratic congresswomen of colour should “go back” to their countries, Mr Biden called it a “flat, racist attack”.
AP
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