Donald Trump spoke to reporters on Friday about the eulogy Barack Obama provided at the funeral for the late civil rights leader John Lewis.
“Well, he did a bad job for minorities,” Trump said. “I did much more for minorities than he did.”
“If you look at our numbers prior to the plague coming in and those numbers will soon be back, you’ll see I did a much better job than Obama did by far for African Americans, for Asian Americans, for any group you look at — far better than Obama did.”
President Trump reaction to President Obama: “He did a bad job for minorities. I did much more for minorities than he did.” pic.twitter.com/nNv6PnPf4O
— CSPAN (@cspan) July 31, 2020
Obama’s decision to bail out Wall Street after the 2008 financial crisis paved the way for the destruction of middle-class wealth, Jacobin opined. The publication claimed that this damage hit Blacks the hardest, and African American wealth only returned to its 2007 level by 2016.
“The decision to hang homeowners — especially Black homeowners — out to dry was a catastrophe.”
As noted by BBC News , Black unemployment was 5.5 percent in September of last year, which is the lowest ever since the U.S. Department of Labor began releasing the figure in the 1970s. However, as of May, unemployment in this demographic was 16.8 percent, which is the highest recorded since March 2010, when Obama was president.
According to the publication, African American unemployment was on a steady decline, although this supposedly began while Obama was in office. As far as wages, Black households earn approximately 60 percent less than white households in the United States. Per BBC News , Black household income is stalling under Trump’s leadership.
The latest data on Black poverty is from 2018, which showed the rate at 20.8 percent — approximately 8.9 million people. This is supposedly the lowest rate on record since the statistic was tracked in the 1960s.
Trump has faced many accusations of racism throughout the duration of his presidency. As The Inquisitr reported, politician Bakari Sellers recently slammed Trump for his use of the phrase “Kung flu” to describe coronavirus . The real estate mogul has also been accused of appealing to racists via the Southern Strategy , which was purportedly used in the 1960s to appeal to racism against Black Americans.
In a piece for CNN , John Blake argued that Trump’s presidency has created a landscape that has emboldened progressives and been a catalyst for Democratic change more than anything seen in Obama’s presidency. According to Blake, Trump has also removed the facade that has covered up America’s racism — a problem the writer argued Obama didn’t try to solve.
