Democrat Stacey Abrams pointed to President Trump’s use of the phrase “kung flu” to describe the coronavirus as an example of the bigotry in the United States she says he’s counting on to help him win reelection.
“Once again, he shows that racism is the core of his appeal,” the failed Georgia gubernatorial candidate, who is black, said Wednesday on MSNBC. “It is the trope that he relies on in order to gin up his supporters. And what is deeply disheartening and deeply disturbing is that as we have this moment of reckoning around the systemic racism that blacks have faced since 1619 in this country, we cannot ignore what has happened to Latino communities under his leadership, the Asian American community that has to listen to his slurs against them because of a disease that is ravaging and killing our people.”
Trump has used the term at rallies and during other events in recent days.
“By the way, it’s a disease, without question, [that] has more names than any disease in history,” Trump said at a rally in Tulsa, Oklahoma, on Saturday. “I can name kung flu. I can name 19 different versions of names.”
The president used the phrase again two days later.
“I said the other night, there’s never been anything where they have so many names,” Trump said during an event in Arizona on Tuesday, speaking about his rally in Tulsa over the weekend. “I could give you 19 or 20 names for that, right? It’s got all different names.”
When pressed about why the president uses a phrase that could be offensive to some minorities, White House aides have said Trump is accurately trying to represent how the coronavirus outbreak originated in Wuhan, China.
“The president has made very clear that he wants everybody to understand, and I think many Americans do understand, that the virus originated in China,” Kellyanne Conway, a top counselor to the president, said on Wednesday.
CBS News’s Weijia Jiang asked White House press secretary Kayleigh McEnany this week to explain what Trump meant when he said at his rally over the weekend that he is the “least racist person in the world” and why he has used the phrase.
“What the president does do is point to the fact that the origin of the virus is China,” McEnany replied. “I would also point out that the media blames President Trump for using the terms ‘China virus’ and ‘Wuhan virus’ when they themselves have used these very terms.”
Since losing a bid for governor of Georgia in 2018, Abrams has spoken out against what she and Democratic allies say is rampant voter suppression efforts by Republicans that rig elections against black candidates and causes.
The systemic problems related to race and voting in the U.S., Abrams said, come straight from the top.
“[Trump] lacks the moral courage, he lacks the integrity, and he lacks the capacity to lead,” she said. “That is why it is so critical that we elect Joe Biden, that we take the Senate, but that we also remember that we’re not just having the 2016 redo of our election, we’re also running the 2010 election where we have to go all the way down the ballot and make certain that we elect state legislators and governors who will ensure that the maps drawn in 2021 based on this census reflect the needs and values of the whole country.”
