Twitter users mercilessly mocked President Donald Trump on Sunday after he falsely claimed Democratic presidential nominee Joe Biden referred to Black adolescents as “superpredators.”
“Joe Biden called Black Youth SUPER PREDATORS,” Trump tweeted. “They will NEVER like him, or vote for him. They are voting for ‘TRUMP’.”
But there’s no evidence Biden ever used the term “superpredators.” It’s likely Trump confused Biden with Hillary Clinton, the 2016 Democratic presidential nominee, who used the term to refer to young people in gangs while discussing a controversial 1994 crime bill.
Though Clinton did not directly refer to race when she described “superpredators,” her use of the term was widely scrutinised, and many anti-racism activists and Democrats accused her of referring to young Black people.
Biden referred to “predators” while discussing at-risk youth in the 1990s but did not directly refer to Black people at the time, and he has not publicly used the term “superpredators.”
“That was Hillary, dum-dum, not Joe,” tweeted attorney George Conway, who is married to former Trump aide Kellyanne Conway. “On the other hand, it was you who said two Black members of Congress should ‘go back’ to the ‘crime infested places from which they came,’ said that ‘laziness is a trait in Blacks,’ and said you ‘hate’ having ‘Black guys counting my money.’”
Following a wave of fact-checking on Twitter, Trump tweeted ― without evidence ― that Biden “constantly used the term ‘Super Predator’ when referring to young Black Men, according to my sources.”
Trump, who has repeatedly railed against journalists who cite anonymous sources, did not reveal his supposed sources. The Trump campaign did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
“This is simply not true,” journalist Eric Michael Garcia tweeted. “Biden DID write the crime bill but Hillary Clinton said superpredators. Trump REALLY wishes he were running against Clinton.”
CNN reported that Trump supported “tough on crime” bills of the 1990s and wrote in his 2000 book, “The America We Deserve,” that “wolf packs” of children roamed the streets and “terrorized urban America.”
“The problem isn’t that we have too many people locked up,” Trump wrote. “It’s that we don’t have enough criminals locked up.”
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