CNN’s Don Lemon believes that former President Donald Trump debunked his view that Americans were living in a “post-racial” country.
During an appearance on ABC’s “The View” Tuesday, Lemon shared how he believed America had entered into a “post-racial” era before Trump burst onto the political scene.
“Donald Trump was a symptom, as we have all been saying,” Lemon said, adding, “Racism and this sort of wackiness has been around forever.”
He went on to describe the former president as the “tumor” that “drove into the oncologist’s office so that we could have the problem diagnosed and then excised.”
Lemon argued that there “wasn’t much about policy that Donald Trump said, or did, or believed in, or accomplished.”
“Mostly what he did do was served to divide the country,” he said.
However, there is something else he alleges Trump did.
“He also exposed the racism and the original sin of this country, which is slavery and racism and Jim Crow,” Lemon said.
He continued:
“We thought that maybe we were in a post-racial era, and we weren’t. We were living a lie, and Donald Trump, I hate to say it, he showed us the truth, and he showed us who many of our neighbors are, not all of them, but many of them.”
Watch the video below:
.@donlemon: “[Trump] exposed the racism.”
— The View (@TheView) March 15, 2021
“We thought that maybe we were in a post-racial era, and we weren’t. We were living a lie and Donald Trump, I hate to say it, he showed us the truth and he showed us who many of our neighbors are, not all of them, but many of them.” pic.twitter.com/IBpu90woEm
Lemon is not alone in believing that large swaths of Americans hold racists views.
During an appearance on HBO’s “Real Time” in November, MSNBC contributor Malcolm Nance insisted that the 70 million voters who cast their ballot for Trump are “racists.”
“They have been on-air saying this: These people have revealed themselves for the racists that they are, the tribalists that they are, they don’t care about ‘E Pluribus Unum, ‘from many, one,’ they care about ‘I got mine and, you know, you shouldn’t get anything of yours,” Nance said.
When host Bill Maher asked Nance if he was suggesting that every Trump voter is racist, Nance responded, “They voted for this consciously knowing what Donald Trump stood for, for the last four years! They know him.”
Erika D. Smith, a commentator for the Los Angeles Times, noted those who oppose Trump try to explain his appeal by claiming that his supporters are fueled by “white grievance politics.”
“There are a lot of white people who are irrationally angry because they are afraid of losing power when the country, like California, becomes majority minority in a few decades,” she added.