WILMINGTON, DE — On July 23rd, presumptive Democratic Presidential Nominee and Former Vice President Joe Biden claimed that President Donald J. Trump (R) is the first ‘racist’ ever to be elected as president. While speaking during a Service Employees International Union (SEIU) virtual roundtable discussion, Biden made the controversial statement about his opponent.
“No sitting president has ever done this,” Biden stated. “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.”
Following his remarks, Trump 2020 Senior Advisor Katrina Pierson released a statement, accusing Biden ‘insulting’ the intelligence of black voters.
“This is an insult to the intelligence of Black voters and is really rich coming from a guy who proudly befriended segregationists, touted an award from George Wallace, honored a former Exalted Cyclops of the Ku Klux Klan, worried his kids would grow up in a ‘racial jungle,’ marveled that Barack Obama was ‘articulate’ and ‘clean,’ bragged about being from a slave state, and repeatedly used the n-word,” Pearson expressed. “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. No one should take lectures on racial justice from Joe Biden.”
Fact-checkers also ranked Biden’s accusation of President Trump being the first ‘racist president’ as historically inaccurate. President Andrew Johnson was vehemently racist as a southern native, registered Democrat before and after the civil war.
In a letter to Benjamin B. French, the federal commissioner of the Public Buildings Service, Johnson wrote,
“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.”
Johnson also told Thomas C. Fletcher, the governor of Missouri,
“This is a country for white men, and by God, as long as I am President, it shall be a government for white men.”
In addition to Johnson, several presidents have historically documented racist pasts. Harry Truman was presumably a member of the Ku Klux Klan early in his career, though he desegregated the military as president. Lyndon B. Johnson regularly used the n-word and was accused of saying, “I’ll have those n**gers voting Democratic for the next two hundred years,” prior to his signage of the 1964 Civil Rights Act. In private conversations with his senate colleagues, Johnson purportedly referred to the Civil Rights Act of 1957 as the “n**ger bill.”
Historian Doris Kearns Goodwin also found this statement from LBJ,
“These negroes, they’re getting pretty uppity these days and that’s a problem for us since they’ve got something now they never had before, the political pull to back up their uppityness,” Johnson reportedly said. “Now, we’ve got to do something about this, we’ve got to give them a little something, just enough to quiet them down, not enough to make a difference. For if we don’t move at all, then their allies will line up against us and there’ll be no way of stopping them, we’ll lose the filibuster and there’ll be no way of putting a brake on all sorts of wild legislation. It’ll be Reconstruction all over again.”
Biden’s historically inaccurate statement can be added to the multitude of blunders already made on the 2020 campaign trail.
