The Associated Press has accused President Donald Trump of appealing to white voters and downplaying the legacy of slavery in the United States during his Constitution Day speech at the National Archives on Thursday.
Under the headline “Trump downplays legacy of slavery in appeal to white voters,” AP reported that the president’s speech Thursday amounted to “a defense of white culture and a denunciation of Democrats, the media and others who he accused of trying to indoctrinate school children and shame their parents’ ‘whiteness.’”
Furthermore, AP reported:
He also argued that America’s founding “set in motion the unstoppable chain of events that abolished slavery, secured civil rights, defeated communism and fascism and built the most fair, equal and prosperous nation in human history.” But he did not mention the 246 years of slavery in America, including the 89 years it was allowed to continue after the colonies declared independence from England. Nor did the president acknowledge the ongoing fight against racial injustice and police brutality, which has prompted months of protests this year.
AP did not, however, report that Trump decried the effects of teaching minority children about Critical Race Theory — an ideology that operates under a distinctly different definition of racism and contends that racism is a permanent feature of American society — as especially harmful and a form of child abuse.
“This is offensive and outrageous to Americans of every ethnicity,” said Trump of a recent incident at the Smithsonian, which released a digital pamphlet calling “hard work” and “individualism” racially white concepts. He added: “It is especially harmful to children of minority backgrounds who should be uplifted, not disparaged. Teaching this horrible doctrine is a form of child abuse in the truest sense of those words.”
The Associated Press also reported that Trump “cracked down on anti-racism training sessions in the federal government.” What the Trump administration actually did was prohibit trainings that teach Critical Race Theory, white privilege, that America is inherently racist or evil, or that “any race or ethnicity is inherently racist or evil.”
The reporting echoes the newswire’s coverage of Trump’s Mount Rushmore Speech, in which the president defended American values and principles. At the time, The Associated Press, The Washington Post, and The New York Times all characterized Trump’s speech as divisive, with the Post and the Times both referring to it as “dark.”
Breaking News: President Trump delivered a dark and divisive speech at Mount Rushmore, leaning into the culture wars and barely mentioning the pandemic.https://t.co/03WOgau4Zx
— The New York Times (@nytimes) July 4, 2020
As The Daily Wire reported at the time, Trump’s speech featured, in part, an unapologetic defense of the presidents carved into Mount Rushmore, describing them as “American giants” whose “deeds unleashed the greatest leap in human advancement the world has ever known.”
Trump also called on Americans during the Rushmore speech to defend America from those who seek to destroy the country’s values, describing it as time “to speak up loudly and strongly and powerfully, and defend the integrity of our country.”