- Former Vice President Joe Biden falsely said at an event on Wednesday that President Trump is the first “racist” to serve as president, the Washington Post reported.
- “No Republican president has done this. No Democratic president. We have had racists, and they have existed, they have tried to be elected. He is the first who has done it.”
- A total of 12 former US presidents owned enslaved people, including eight who did so while in office, as noted by the History Channel in 2017.
- Throughout the 19th and 20th centuries, overtly racist presidents who instituted discriminatory and sometimes deadly policies, such as Andrew Jackson and Woodrow Wilson, also served in the office.
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Former 2020 Vice President and Democratic presidential candidate Joe Biden misleadingly and incorrectly suggested that President Donald Trump is the first “racist” to serve as President of the United States, the Washington Post reported Wednesday.
The Post reported that Biden made the remarks at a virtual event for the International Union of Service Employees (SEIU) in the context that Trump referred to the new coronavirus as “the Wuhan virus” or “the China virus,” terms Many advocates say they unfairly stigmatize Asians and Asian Americans.
After calling Trump’s use of the term “disgusting,” Biden said, “No sitting president has ever done this. Never, never, never. No Republican president has done this. No Democratic president. We have had racists, and they ‘have existed, they have tried to be elected president. He is the first to have done so. “
Several racists and open slave owners have, in fact, served in the office of the United States presidency.
The History Channel wrote in 2017 that a total of 12 former US presidents owned enslaved people, including eight who did so while in office. The most prominent American presidents with slave workers include founding fathers George Washington, John Adams, Thomas Jefferson, James Madison, and James Monroe.
And in the process of developing the U.S. Constitution, Madison also devised the 3/5 compromise that saw enslaved people as only 3/5 of a person for population purposes, giving outsized political representation to states with large slave populations.
Throughout the 19th and 20th centuries, other presidents followed policies that openly subjugated, oppressed, and murdered people of color, particularly African Americans, Native Americans, and Asian Americans.
President Andrew Jackson, who served from 1829 to 1937, made forced displacement of Native Americans one of the key components of his domestic policy agenda, now part of his enduring legacy.
Jackson ignored laws and court decisions to forcibly evict Native Americans from their Southeast tribal lands and created the “Trail of Tears,” a more than 5,000-mile route that spans nine states in which Tens of thousands of Native Americans were forced to travel west across the Mississippi River. In addition to those forcibly expelled, many Native Americans did not survive the treacherous and difficult journey.
In the early 1900s, President Woodrow Wilson re-implemented racial segregation in the federal government, openly used racist and dehumanizing language against African Americans, and publicly sympathized with the Klu Klux Klan and even screened “The Birth of the nation”. A pro-KKK white supremacist film, at the White House in 1915.
Later in the 20th century, former President Franklin Delano Roosevelt signed an executive order requiring that the Japanese Americans be detained and held in internment camps following the Pearl Harbor bombing in December 1941, a policy that lasted from 1942 to 1946.
