Joe Biden calls Trump the country's first racist president

Democratic presidential nominee Joe Biden called US President Donald Trump the country’s first racist president on Wednesday (July 22) during a virtual town hall organized by the Service Employees International Union.

When a questioner complained of racism surrounding the coronavirus outbreak and mentioned the president referring to it as the “Chinese virus, Biden responded by blasting Trump and his spread of racism.

“The way he deals with people based on the colour of their skin, their national origin, where they’re from, is absolutely sickening. No sitting president has ever done this. Never, never, never. No Republican president has done this. No Democratic president. Wev’e had racists, and they’ve existed. They’ve tried to get elected president. He’s the first one that has,” the former vice president said

Biden also suggested that Trump is using race as a wedge to distract from his mishandling of the pandemic.

At a White House briefing later Wednesday, Trump responded to a question about Biden’s comments by pointing to his administrations efforts passing criminal justice reform legislation and expanding opportunity zones, as well as the low unemployment numbers for minority groups before the coronavirus outbreak.

“I’ve done more for Black Americans than anybody with the possible of exception of Abraham Lincoln,” the president said.

Nobody has even been close. Katrina Pierson, a senior adviser for Trumps re-election campaign, said in a statement that no one should take lectures on racial justice from Joe Biden.”

Biden has vowed that, if elected, he will begin addressing institutional racism within his first 100 days of taking office. This was not the first time he’s suggested Trump’s actions were racist.

Biden has built his campaign around the election being a battle for the ‘soul of the nation’ and says he felt compelled to run for president after he saw Trump respond to a deadly 2017 white supremacist attack on counter-protesters in Charlottesville, Virginia, by saying “there were some very fine people” on both sides.

When Trump said last year that four Democratic congresswomen of color should go back to their countries, Biden called it a flat, racist attack.