WASHINGTON (AP) – Joe Biden said President Donald Trump was the country’s “first” racist president.
The alleged remarks by the Democratic presidential candidate came during a virtual town hall organized by the International Union of Service Employees. When one interlocutor complained about racism around the coronavirus outbreak and mentioned the president referring to him as the “China virus,” Biden responded by criticizing Trump and “his spread of racism.”
“The way he treats people based on their skin color, their national origin, where they are from, is absolutely disgusting,” said the former vice president. “No sitting president has done this. Never never never. No republican president has done this. There is no Democratic President. We have had racists and they have existed. They have tried to be elected president. He is the first to have it. “
Biden also suggested that Trump is using the race “like a wedge” to distract himself from his mishandling of the pandemic.
Many presidents, including the nation’s first slave, George Washington, were slaves.
President Woodrow Wilson, the country’s 28th president, is stripped of his name from Princeton University’s school of public policy after recent protests against institutional racism and police brutality. Wilson, who served in the early 20th century, supported segregation and imposed it on various federal agencies.
In a briefing at the White House on Wednesday night, Trump answered a question about Biden’s comments, noting his administration’s efforts to pass criminal justice reform legislation and expand opportunity zones, as well as low unemployment numbers for minority groups before the coronavirus outbreak.
“I have done more for African Americans than anyone with the possible exception of Abraham Lincoln,” said the president. “No one has been around.”
Katrina Pierson, senior adviser to Trump’s re-election campaign, said in a statement that “no one should take Joe Biden’s lectures on racial justice.”
Biden has promised that, if elected, he will begin addressing institutional racism within his first 100 days of taking office. This was not the first time he suggested that Trump’s actions were racist.
Biden has built his campaign around the elections as a “battle for the soul of the nation” and says he felt compelled to run for president after seeing Trump respond to a deadly 2017 white supremacist attack on protesters in Charlottesville, Virginia, saying there were “some very good people” on both sides.
When Trump said last year that four Democratic congressmen of color should “return” to their countries, Biden called it a “flat and racist attack.”
