Updated | President Donald Trump can't possibly be a racist because all he cares about is money, his son said on Wednesday in an attempt to deflect accusations against the president after he derided black-majority nations as "shithole countries."
“My father sees one color, green. That is all he cares about,” Eric Trump said on Fox & Friends, a show regularly watched by his dad. “He cares about the economy. He does not see race. He is [the] least racist person I ever met in my entire life.”
Eric Trump went on to claim that African-American unemployment is the lowest it has ever been in the nation’s history and that “they”–presumably the media and Democrats–won’t give him any credit for that.
“They’ll go out and call him racist. It’s very sad, it’s a race to the bottom,” he said. “They stoop very, very low. The reason they do that is they don’t have their own message.”
JONATHAN DRAKE/REUTERS
The 34-year-old’s comment sparked immediate reaction on Twitter, with people tweeting at the president’s son questions like, “If your father only sees green, why did he have to settle with the @CivilRights for housing discrimination against black people?”
Always fun being on @FoxandFriends!
The president seemed excited about his son’s appearance and tweeted, “Eric Trump on @foxandfriends now!” early Wednesday morning.
The president, of course, has been called a racist repeatedly, most recently after he called African nations and Haiti "shithole countries" and said he wished more immigrants came from overwhelmingly white Norway.
That comment, which came during a meeting with Congressional leaders about immigration, prompted the New York Times to publish a "definitive" list of "Donald Trump's racism.”
The list started with accusations from the 1970s against Trump and his father for discriminating against black renters in their apartment complexes and also featured the racially charged full-page ads he took out in 1989 that called for the death penalty for five men accused of raping a woman in Central Park. The men were later exonerated.
More recently, of course, Trump called Mexicans "rapists" and drug dealers, referred to a Hispanic Miss Universe as “Miss Housekeeping," retweeted anti-Islam conspiracy videos, trafficked in anti-Semitic memes and called Senator Elizabeth Warren "Pocahontas" even as he was supposedly honoring Native American World War II heroes at a White House event.
Eric Trump, who is the president's third child, had defended his father against charges of racism in November after the “Pocahontas” comment.
“The irony of an ABC reporter (whose parent company Disney has profited nearly half a billion dollars on the movie “Pocahontas”) inferring that the name is 'offensive' is truly staggering to me,” he tweeted.
An earlier version of this story had a Twitter headline that suggested Eric Trump said the exact words when, in fact, the headline was paraphrasing him.
