PresidentDonald Trumpis, at least according to Housing SecretaryBen Carson, not a racist.
Carson, 68, seemed to go off-script while talking about Trump’s “kindness and compassion” and diverted into a defense against the widespread criticism over how the president, 73, has talked about race and minorities.
“You know, talking to the people who drive the cars and park the cars at Mar-a-Lago, they love him — the people who wash the dishes, because he’s kind and compassionate,” Carson reportedly said, adding, “When he bought Mar-a-Lago, he was the one who fought for Jews and blacks to be included in the clubs that were trying to exclude them. You know, people say he’s a racist, he is not a racist.”
Housing Secretary Ben Carson.Shutterstock
Despite that argument, the president has his own problematic history with race: In 2018, former White House aideOmarosa Manigault Newmanclaimed he had used the n-wordand a recording later surfacedwhich seemed to show his team discussing that he had said that and felt “embarrassed.”
In another controversy, Trump reportedlyspoke derogatorily about Haiti and Nigeria, two majority-black countries. (The White House denied this.)
He has also repeatedly made unusually soft or hedged statements about white nationalists, including in the wake of a “Unite the Right” rally in Virginia in August 2017 in which a counter-protestor was murdered. He said there were “very fine people, on both sides.”
The president further faced much backlash last year for racist tweets telling a group of Democratic lawmakers who are women of color to “go back” to the “crime-infested places from which they came” — despite the fact that they are all American.
Trumpdefended himself then, insisting, similar to Carson, “I don’t have a racist bone in my body.”
source: people.com
