President Donald Trump called former New York City Mayor Mike Bloomberg “a total racist.”
Trump’s comments came in a tweet posted Tuesday that was soon deleted, according to Factbase. The president had written: “WOW, BLOOMBERG IS A TOTAL RACIST!”
Attached to the tweet was an audio recording posted by Benjamin Dixon, who is described as a podcaster.
The audio is that of Bloomberg speaking to the Aspen Institute in 2015. In the speech, Bloomberg defended the controversial “stop and frisk” policy.
Bloomberg can be heard saying: “Ninety-five percent of your murders – murderers and murder victims, fit one M.O. You can just take a description, Xerox it, and pass it out to all the cops. They are male, minorities, 16-25. That's true in New York, that's true in virtually every city (inaudible). And that's where the real crime is. You've got to get the guns out of the hands of people that are getting killed.”
Trump campaign manager Brad Parscale tweeted Tuesday: "#BloombergIsARacist." Parscale attached a tweet from another poster of Bloomberg in an undated radio interview.
In the clip. Bloomberg says: "They just keep saying: 'Oh it's a disproportionate percentage of a particular ethnic group.' That may be, but it's not a disproportionate percentage of those who witnesses and victims describe as committing murder.
"In that case, incidentally, "I think we disproportionately stop whites too much and minorities too little."