Downriver Today

President Donald Trump has accomplished more to help African Americans in 47 months than former Vice President Joe Biden did in 47 years in politics, Trump’s re-election campaign press secretary, Hogan Gidley, told the host of WJR's "The Frank Beckmann Show."

“It was Donald Trump who decided that the KKK was going to be prosecuted as a terrorist organization,” Gidley told Beckmann. “Joe Biden never did that. Barack Obama didn’t do that. Kamala Harris never did that.”

Biden has “a very checkered past” on racial issues, Gidley said, including attending the funeral of former Klan member Robert Byrd and “profusely praising” the late West Virginia senator, Gidley told Beckmann.

Former Vice President Joe Biden | stock photo

“He touted an award he got from George Wallace, he worried his kids were going to grow up in a ‘racial jungle’ and said that Barack Obama was ‘so articulate and clean,’” Gidley said on the show.

Trump got rid of the crime bill Biden supported and made criminal justice reform a reality by eliminating disproportionate sentencing, the press secretary said. Trump gave record funding to historically Black colleges and universities and created “opportunity zones” in cities, which saw higher wage increases than the rest of the nation.

“Record-high employment for African Americans -- we’ve never seen anything like that,” Gidley told Beckmann.

Trump also supported school choice, “making sure children have a chance to get a good education and get out of a failing school system,” Gidley said on the radio program.

“This president is for all those things. He has been praised by the African-American community for decades and decades. He was one of the first people to have country clubs and properties that he opened to Jewish Americans and African Americans. Nobody else did in the region. He was the only one who did that," Gidley told Beckmann. 

Attacking Trump as a racist is “stupid and ignorant,” Gidley claimed.

“This man has done more to bolster that community than anybody on the left has done for decades,” he told Beckmann.