Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer said former President Donald Trump bears responsibility for the rise in violent attacks against Asian Americans.
Speaking on the Senate floor Thursday, Schumer said the former president stirred up “dark forces” of hate for the Asian American community by blaming the COVID-19 pandemic on the Chinese and by refusing to denounce other forms of racism plaguing the country.
“Somehow, after four years of the Trump presidency, they are rising to the surface and seem too acceptable to too many people,” the New York Democrat said.
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Schumer made the remarks two days after a white man killed eight people, six of whom were women of Asian descent, who worked at massage parlors in the Atlanta area. The man appeared to be targeting the massage parlors and not Asian people specifically, but hate crimes against Asian Americans have been on the rise in 16 cities, according to the Center for the Study of Hate and Extremism at California State University at San Bernardino, which analyzed police data.
Schumer said there have been 3,800 “incidents of hate” against Asian Americans and Pacific Islanders over a one-year span and said Trump is at least partly to blame for refusing to condemn racism while he was in office.
Trump continues to call COVID-19 the “China virus” because it appears to have originated in Wuhan, China.
Schumer said Trump, during his presidency, did not go far enough to condemn racism. Democrats often claim Trump would not condemn the white nationalists who were part of the violent clashes in Charlottesville, Virginia, in 2017. Trump clarified several times that he condemned the white nationalists but not the people protesting the removal of Confederate statues.
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Schumer said Trump did not do enough to stem the rise in racism and that President Biden and Democrats plan to fight bigotry.
“In the last four years, we all know there have been forces of racism, dark forces that have been often seen in America, but during the last four years, where Donald Trump at the very minimum refused to condemn the bigotry in the instances when he should have, have allowed them to come far more to the surface,” Schumer said.
