Tuesday, Sen. Mazie Hirono (D-HI) reacted to President Donald Trump’s exchange from the day before with Asian CBS News White House correspondent Weijia Jiang in which Jiang took offense to Trump telling her to ask her “nasty” coronavirus-related question to China.
Hirono told MSNBC’s “Morning Joe” that “the true xenophobic” Trump came out when he got a question from an Asian woman that he did not want to answer. She pointed out Trump has called her “nasty” before, too.
“He sees an Asian person who asks a question that he doesn’t want to answer, and the true xenophobic Trump comes out, and he calls it a nasty question,” Hirono told co-host Mika Brzezinski. “I mean, he’s called me nasty, he’s called me various kinds of names. He can’t handle women, particularly strong women, and we know that Trump is xenophobic, and it comes out time and again.”
She added, “We all know that racism against raise Asian-Americans is on the rise. There are more hate crimes against Asian-Americans. When you have a president who calls it the Chinese virus and when you have members of his administration calling it the ‘kung flu,’ etc., and the president has not made it plain that we condemn anti-Asian, racist attacks, but he doesn’t do that strongly enough, obviously, and so we have seen a rise in hate crimes against Asians. You have total strangers knifing people because they think that they brought the virus into our country. And you have all kinds of actions in this way. And the president knows this. He knows that what he says matters, it provokes these kinds of responses, and people who think that they can act on the kinds of words that the president uses — very divisive.”
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