President Donald Trump accused Joe Biden of calling Black youth “super predators” in a Tweet on Sunday (Nov. 1) and added that they would “never” vote for the Democratic candidate in the upcoming presidential election.
“Joe Biden called Black Youth SUPER PREDATORS. They will NEVER like him, or vote for him. They are voting for ‘TRUMP,’” the president tweeted on Sunday.
Fact-checkers have shown previously that the former vice president did not make the statement, but that it was made by Hillary Clinton in 2016.
The president also brought up the false claim at at a rally in Michigan on Saturday (Oct. 31). “For 47 years, Joe Biden viciously attacked African Americans. We know that. He shipped away your jobs, decimated the Black middle class, and flooded your cities with foreign labor, gangs and drugs,” he said to his supporters. “He openly called—and I think everyone knows this—he openly called young Black men ‘super predators.’ In 1994, the crime bill, he devastated Black families in places like Philadelphia, Atlanta, Milwaukee, Detroit.”
In response to the tweet from this morning and the rally, people were quick to remind the president of his call for five Black and brown teenagers to be executed in the 1980s, who were exonerated after being falsely convicted of assaulting a jogger in Central Park.
“The first campaign you ever ran was to have the innocent Central Park 5 given the death penalty for a crime they didn’t commit,” one person tweeted. “And for a matter of fact, Joe Biden never called black men or boys “super predators.” Hillary Clinton did though.”
At the final presidential debate in Oct., Trump called the former vice president out for supporting the 1994 Violent Crime Control and Law Enforcement Act — which Biden has said was a mistake. Biden responded by mentioning the president’s treatment of the Exonerated Five, the five Black and Latino teenagers in New York City who were wrongly accused of raping and beating a woman in Central Park.
“He talked about marauding gangs, young gangs — people who are going to maraud our cities,” Biden said. “This is the guy who when the Central Park Five — five innocent Black kids — he continued to push for making sure that they got the death penalty. None of them were guilty of the crimes that were suggested.”
Trump ran full-page newspaper ads that called for the group to receive the death penalty, at the time but even after removing them, he has not acknowledged their innocence. After the debate, Kevin Richardson and Raymond Santana of the Exonerated Five took to social media to share their thoughts on Trump.
“To the folks that’s still undecided about whom to vote for this upcoming election… Allow me to reintroduce ourselves,” Richardson wrote. “If it was up to Trump’s idea of calling for the death penalty and putting a bounty over my brothers and I head, we wouldn’t be here today!”
“When Joe Biden calls out Donald Trump for wanting to give us the DEATH PENALTY. We were kids!! But we are still here,” Santana posted a video clip of the debate alongside the caption.