President Donald Trump has set off a firestorm with his recent demands that progressive women of color serving in Congress “go back where they came from” instead of criticizing his administration, and it’s now affecting the currently underway 2020 presidential race. Democratic frontrunner and former Vice President Joe Biden bluntly slammed Trump as racist in the wake of his latest behavior. Asked by a reporter what his response was to Trump declaring he didn’t have a racist bone in his body, Biden quipped:
‘That means he has no bones.’
Watch:
On Pres. Trump’s remark that he doesn’t “have a racist bone in my body,” former Vice President Joe Biden tells @ABC News, “That means he has no bones.” https://t.co/2t8ptVibgA pic.twitter.com/DMMObjxmrE
— ABC News (@ABC) July 17, 2019
Biden also discussed the Republican Party’s continued capitulation to the president’s racism. When the U.S. House recently brought up a resolution condemning Trump’s demands of progressive women of color as “racist,” only four Republicans (and recently independent, former Republican Justin Amash) voted in favor of the resolution. Some of them even tried to keep the whole resolution effort from going forward, bringing out a decorum rule to challenge House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) declaring Trump’s behavior to be “racist” while on the House floor.
Biden suggested that the GOP has currently “lost its nerve” and right now, Trump “owns the Republican Party,” citing political landscape features like the looming threat of Republican power players taking on any GOP official who dares dissent from the party line. Trump himself reinforced this notion; after dozens of Republicans lost their seats in Congress in the 2018 midterm elections, at his post-midterms press conference, he blamed those Republicans for their losses because they supposedly didn’t align themselves closely enough with his administration. In other words, Trump seems intent on wannabe dictatorship inside and outside the Republican Party.
Ironically, Biden himself has faced criticism over his record on race relations. Fellow presidential contender and California Senator Kamala Harris lambasted Biden during the recent first Democratic presidential primary debates over his dismal at best dismissal of the idea of using federally directed busing to racially integrate schools. Even at the time, however, Harris insisted that she was not calling Biden “racist.” In the Democratic Party, the conversation surrounds the best way to ensure the best treatment for minority communities. On the right under Trump, the conversation involves questioning whether those communities even deserve any humane treatment in the first place.
Besides his demands for progressive women of color to get out of here, his administration has undertaken similar policy steps like their very recent attempt to shut out asylum provisions to most asylum seekers. They want to eliminate the possibility for the vast majority of those who pass through another country to get to the United States, which the American Civil Liberties Union has already taken on in court.
It is likely that further down the line, Biden will be the one to take on Trump in the 2020 general election. He is consistently far ahead in polls, and sits about 13 percent ahead of his next closest challenger in the current RealClearPolitics average of polls. The lead has shrunk since his campaign announcement but it’s still about double what he had when he was just a hypothetical candidate and hadn’t yet formally announced.
Featured Image via screenshot
