Wednesday on CNN’s “Newsroom,” Black Lives Matter founding member Melina Abdullah called President Donald Trump the “embodiment of white supremacist terrorism.”
Baldwin said, “President Trump is lashing out at New York City’s plans to paint black lives matter on Fifth Avenue right outside of his Trump Tower calling the phrase denigrating and symbol of hate.”
She continued, “So let’s just begin with the words the president used about this street painting, a symbol of hate, your response to that?”
Abdullah said, “I think it’s the height of hypocrisy for Donald Trump to call anything a symbol of hate. He is the embodiment of hate, and for him to say that affirming the value of black life is somehow hate, again, reminds us of who he is.”
Baldwin said, “If you just look at this week alone, the fact that he shared two videos on Twitter, one of which showing, you know, this guy shouting ‘white power,’ the other showing a couple in St. Louis pointing guns at protesters and then this NYPD tweet. It is only Wednesday. He is stoking the racial divide in this country. The election is still four months away, so if and quite frankly, when the president does this again, how should the country respond?”
Abdullah said, “I think we need to remember who he is — that Donald Trump is the embodiment of white supremacist terrorism. When he is tweeting videos of people throwing up white power and really entrenching himself within the white terrorist movement, right? He’s done that not just only over the last week, but over the last four years, and you see that really manifest in terms of the surge in hate crimes, which are primarily meted out on black people and at the hands of white people. So it’s really important to understand what Donald Trump has done to this country, and where he’s chosen to align himself. So for him, again, to call anything hate is really the height of hypocrisy, and, you know, we need as a country to be willing to point to him and say that he is actually the terrorist in chief.”
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