Donald Trump Jr. Says He Didn't Know White Supremacist Radio Host Was a White Supremacist
If Donald Trump Jr. had known that the radio host he was speaking to was pro-slavery, Bloomberg Politics reports, he would not have consented to the interview: “This is clearly the mainstream media trying to turn a story into nothing,” he said. Pardon?
The interview, recorded at a campaign event in Tennessee and to be aired this weekend, was conducted with the white supremacist James Edwards, who has said that “slavery is the greatest thing that ever happened to” black Americans and that “interracial sex is white genocide.” Edwards has received media credentials from the Trump campaign.
The media, the younger Trump said, has unfairly scrutinized his error, “much like they did with my father, who I witnessed denouncing David Duke and any KKK endorsement on multiple occasions.”
Notice that he kept saying "I disavow" over and over again, but never said "I disavow David Duke" or "Disavow white supremacist groups"
— Joe Weisenthal (@TheStalwart) March 2, 2016
According to Bloomberg, Donald Jr. said the interview “was not vetted.” He called 35 different stations to speak about his father’s campaign, one host asked him to call another, and that person was Edwards. “Had I known? I would have obviously never done an interview with him.”
Trump spokeswoman Hope Hicks, in a statement to The Hill earlier in the day, said of Edwards, “The campaign had no knowledge of his personal views and strongly condemns them.”
(Strangely, however, Hicks went on to deny that Trump Jr. spoke to Edwards at all: “Donald Trump Jr. was not in attendance and although he served as a surrogate for his father on several radio programs over the past week, to his knowledge and that of the campaign, did not participate in an interview with this individual.”)
For his part, Edwards wrote in a blog post Wednesday that his show, The Political Cesspool, “promotes a proud, paleoconservative Christian worldview, and we reject media descriptions of our work as ‘white supremacist,’ ‘pro-slavery’ and other such scare words.”
“The grotesque way in which the media is purposefully misrepresenting my work by taking certain cherry-picked statements wildly out of context is both shameful and reprehensible. That said, I apologize for nothing and I retract nothing.”
