Presumptive Democratic presidential nominee Joe Biden in 2012 said Mitt Romney’s tax policy would put “y’all back in chains,” a startling comment that has resurfaced as Biden takes heat for calling Donald Trump the first racist president.
“Romney wants to, he said in the first 100 days, he’s going to let the big banks once again write their own rules. Unchain Wall Street,” Vice President Biden told a crowd of about 800 in Danville, Va., during a campaign stop. “They’re going to put y’all back in chains.”
Andrea Saul, Romney’s spokeswoman at the time, said Biden's comments were “not acceptable in our political discourse and demonstrate yet again that the Obama campaign will say and do anything to win this election. President Obama should tell the American people whether he agrees with Joe Biden's comments."
The Obama campaign defended Biden’s lingo, saying it was a variation on comments Republicans have made about unshackling the private sector and Biden’s push to unshackle the middle class.
President Barack Obama, the first Black president elected in the U.S., himself said the phrasing was a “distraction from what’s at stake.”
Ben Shapiro, the 32-year-old former editor-at-large of Breitbart News, at the time called Biden’s comments “race-baiting at its finest.”
Some political pundits said Biden’s comments led to the 2012 presidential campaign becoming fully engulfed in racial politics.
"The incivility came quickly to the forefront with the comments by Joe Biden, which caused such a negative reaction from Mitt Romney, who took it rather personally," Ron Bonjean, a GOP political consultant in Washington, told US News in 2012.
Biden called Trump a racist Wednesday during a virtual town hall organized by the Service Employees International Union.
"The way he deals with people based on the color of their skin, their national origin, where they’re from, is absolutely sickening,” Biden said. “No sitting president has ever done this. Never, never, never. No Republican president has done this. No Democratic president. We’ve had racists, and they’ve existed. They’ve tried to get elected president. He’s the first one that has.”
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