The president’s remarks had been the most recent instance of his refusal to acknowledge the racial discrimination that even many in his personal occasion have stated should be addressed. However Mr. Trump, who just lately retweeted a video of a supporter shouting “white energy” and stated he would oppose a bipartisan effort in Congress to take away Accomplice names from army bases, has displayed no intention of making an attempt to bridge the nation’s racial divide.
Requested within the CBS interview how he felt about using the Accomplice battle flag in public settings like NASCAR races, the president stated: “With me, it’s freedom of speech. Quite simple. Prefer it, don’t prefer it, it’s freedom of speech.”
Requested if he understood that the flag was a painful image to many individuals as a reminder of slavery, Mr. Trump stated, “Effectively, individuals like it and I don’t view — I do know those who just like the Accomplice flag they usually’re not desirous about slavery.” He added, “I simply suppose it’s freedom of speech, whether or not it’s Accomplice flags or Black Lives Matter or the rest you wish to discuss.”
4 months right into a pandemic that has price greater than 136,000 lives in the USA, and practically two months after the killing of a Black man by a Minneapolis police officer sparked a nationwide outpouring of anger over racial injustice, Mr. Trump nonetheless solely not often mentions the ache that each crises have brought on many Individuals. Moderately than supply sympathy and compassion, he provokes and assaults.
His feedback within the interviews on Tuesday — a day when Florida once more surpassed its earlier report for coronavirus deaths whereas Republicans pressed forward with plans to carry their conference in Jacksonville subsequent month — got here as he used a information convention that was ostensibly for saying new laws concentrating on China to thrash his opponent, former Vice President Joseph R. Biden Jr.
“His agenda is essentially the most excessive platform of any main occasion nominee, by far, in American historical past,” Mr. Trump stated, calling Mr. Biden’s profession a “present to the Chinese language Communist Celebration.”
Over the course of his quick time as a nationwide political determine, Mr. Trump has used race, faith and ethnicity to divide Individuals. 5 years in the past, he introduced that he was looking for the presidency by denigrating Mexican migrants as rapists and murderers. As a candidate he then referred to as for “a complete and full shutdown of Muslims coming into the USA.”