Speaking during a roundtable discussion with the Service Employees International Union (SEIU) on Wednesday, presumptive Democratic presidential nominee Joe Biden said that Trump has been instrumental in the “spreading of racism, the way he deals with people based on the color of their skin, their national origin, where they’re from, is absolutely sickening.”
“No sitting president has ever done this,” Biden said, as reported by Fox News. “Never, never, never. No Republican president has done this. No Democratic president. We’ve had racists and they’ve existed and they’ve tried to get elected president. He’s the first one that has.”
Former Vice President Joe Biden is either ignorant or forgetful of history to say such a thing, considering that President Andrew Johnson (a Democrat) is considered one of the most virulently racist, if not the worst, president to ever hold office.
“Everyone would, and must admit, that the white race was superior to the black, and that while we ought to do our best to bring them . . . up to our present level, that, in doing so, we should, at the same time raise our own intellectual status so that the relative position of the two races would be the same,” Andrew Johnson said to the federal commissioner of the Public Buildings Service, according to Politico.
According to far-left Vox, former President Woodrow Wilson, also a Democrat, was not only a racist, but even more racist than the standards of his time, as evidenced by his resegregation of the federal government:
Easily the worst part of Wilson’s record as president was his overseeing of the resegregation of multiple agencies of the federal government, which had been surprisingly integrated as a result of Reconstruction decades earlier. At an April 11, 1913, Cabinet meeting, Postmaster General Albert Burleson argued for segregating the Railway Mail Service. He took exception to the fact that workers shared glasses, towels, and washrooms. Wilson offered no objection to Burleson’s plan for segregation, saying that he “wished the matter adjusted in a way to make the least friction.”
Speaking at a White House press conference on Wednesday evening, President Trump responded to Joe Biden’s outlandish claim by highlighting his administration’s many accomplishments for black Americans.
“We’ve passed criminal justice reform, something that Obama and Biden were unable to do,” the president said. “I’ve done more for Black Americans than anybody, with the possible exception of Abraham Lincoln, nobody has even been close.”
The Trump campaign simultaneously called Biden’s claims “outrageous.”
“President Trump loves all people, works hard to empower all Americans, and is supported by more Black voters than any Republican presidential candidate in modern history,” campaign senior adviser Katrina Pierson said in a statement. “No one should take lectures on racial justice from Joe Biden.”