After Clay Aiken Says Trump Is Racist, American Idol Star Must Clarify: ‘I Didn’t Vote For Him!’

Clay Aiken defended Trump in 2016, saying that he didn’t believe Trump was a fascist or a racist. Now that he’s withdrawn that defense, Aiken is having to clarify as social media users lash out. He’s being called on to convince his fellow Trump supporters that they, too, were wrong. There’s just one problem with that: Aiken was never a supporter, and in fact ran for political office himself, in his home state of North Carolina, as a Democrat.

Now Aiken is engaged in a back-and-forth with a stream of Twitter users, defending himself this time, assuring the public that he is a Democrat, who never voted for Trump and encouraged others to support Hillary Clinton. He says he criticized Trump thoroughly throughout the 2016 Presidential campaign, and that calling allegations of racism unfounded didn’t negate any of the things he did criticize the then-candidate for.

In a March 2016 clip, Fox Business presented Clay Aiken, saying that he didn’t believe the Republican candidate was racist. However, that’s not all he said.

Aiken goes on, in the short clip, to explain, “I believe he’s this way, he speaks another way,” and to say that he feels this makes Trump as President a concern, because, “I don’t know what he’ll be when he’s President, you don’t know what he’ll be when he’s President.”