Trump campaign unveils ad showing president 'condemning white supremacy' as Joe Biden needles him over repeated refusal to speak out against extreme right wing groups
President Donald Trump's campaign put out a new video that shows '38 times' he's denounced white supremacy, as Democrat Joe Biden and his allies have hit the president for being racist.
Trump is shown telling NBC's Savannah Guthrie multiple times at a town hall earlier this month that he denounces white supremacy, after a bungled response during the first presidential debate.
The clip from the debate is also shown in the campaign video - though not in its entirety - while the Trump campaign also featured the president's more scripted responses to the racial unrest in Charlottesville in 2017.
A new Trump campaign video includes a counter and shows President Donald Trump denouncing white supremacy 38 times
The spot shows Trump denouncing the support of white supremacist David Duke and other Americans who share Duke's ideology
A senior Trump campaign official told Fox News that it launched the video to push back on the Biden campaign's 'false narrative.' On Tuesday in Atlanta, Democrat Joe Biden said Trump 'fails to condemn white supremacy'
In the nearly five-minute spot, Trump also disavows the support of white supremacist David Duke, and Americans who share his ideology, multiple times.
'President Trump wants to prosecute the KKK as a terrorist organization and has condemned white supremacy at least 38 times. Thirty-eight times!' a senior Trump campaign official told Fox News, explaining they the campaign decided to create the video.
'The Biden campaign continues to sow division and inflame racial tension by spreading this false narrative,' the official said. 'Enough is enough.'
On Tuesday on the campaign trail both Biden and former President Barack Obama went after Trump - and in Obama's case, Jared Kushner - for some of their statements on race.
'Meanwhile, Donald Trump fails to condemn white supremacy, doesn’t believe that systemic racism is a problem, and won’t say that Black lives matter,' Biden said at a rally. 'We know Black lives matter.'
Obama pointed to comments Kushner made on 'Fox & Friends' on Monday.
'His son-in-law says black folks have to want to be successful,' Obama said. 'That's the problem. Who are these folks? What history books do they read? Who do they talk to?'
Trump was criticized after the Cleveland debate for saying he would condemn white supremacy, but not doing it in a robust way.
'Who do you want me to condemn?' Trump said. 'What do you want to call them? Give me a name.'
Biden offered the 'Proud Boys,' a men-only, far-right group.
'Proud Boys, stand back and stand by,' Trump said. 'But I'll tell you what I'll tell you what, somebody has got to do something about Antifa and the left. Because this is not a right-wing problem. This is a left-wing problem.'
Similar complaints were made about Trump's response in the aftermath of the Charlottesville 'Unite the Right' demonstrations in 2017 that brought out the KKK, neo-Nazis and other white supremacists who clashed with counter-protesters, with one killed.
The president got in major trouble when he uttered that there were 'very fine people, on both sides,' though he's said he meant to exclude members of the hate groups from that assessment and was talking about people who had come out to preserve a 'a very, very important statue' of Confederate Gen. Robert E. Lee.
Trump has consistently said he's against white supremacy but promoted maintaining symbols that many people believe support that ideology - such as Confederate monuments.
During this summer's Black Lives Matter protests, Trump would repeatedly weigh in to culture war issues.
He called Black Lives Matter a 'symbol of hate.'
He threatened to veto a major Defense spending bill over a provision that would start the renaming process of military bases still named for Confederate figures.
He consistently complained about protesters who would deface statues.
But Trump has always glossed over that it's Confederate statues that activists find the most problematic - portraying the issue as a slippery slope to the country taking down everything related to a slave-owning founding father, such as the Washington Monument.